AMD RadeonSI Driver 2D Performance Is Getting Better

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 10 January 2014 at 12:59 PM EST. 20 Comments
RADEON
The latest Phoronix article covering AMD's latest graphics processors on Linux was earlier this article in pointing out the Radeon R9 270 is far from perfect. One of the big problems with any Radeon HD 7000 series or newer GPU is the poor 2D acceleration performance with the open-source Linux driver, but performance improvements are coming.

The big issue with the RadeonSI 2D performance for any HD 7000 series GPU or newer is that it utilizes the GLAMOR library for doing 2D hardware acceleration via OpenGL. GLAMOR still has to be tuned as does the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver itself. Phoronix reader Niccolò Belli pointed out some RadeonSI performance improvements that are in development and testing.

One patch he tested and pointed out in an email to me is for speeding up glamor_copy_area for certain use cases. Another is for handling diagonal lines. The first patch fixes a long-standing bug with the KDE raster back-end performance on RadeonSI.

Belli (a.k.a. "darkbasic") additionally wrote, "The second one mitigates the GTK primitives drawing issue and completely fixes the Calc scrolling issue (previously opening some sheets in Calc took 30 seconds and scrolling was almost impossible). Unfortunately the second fix is not going to be merged becuase it isn't the proper way to do it. I don't know about the first one. Anyway we finally have 'decent' 2D acceleration on radenosi."

Additional RadeonSI 2D performance issue details can be found via this FreeDesktop.org bug report.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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