Gallium3D speedup?

[downer]

Is there a way to speedup Gallium3D with a custom xorg.conf or a different window manager than KDE? A new graphics card would help, since I've got a fairly old 7800GS AGP 256MB. But I would rather get this one working with Gallium3D since its more than what I need with the binary nVidia driver. Also, a newer card would mean switching to ATI or getting a whole new computer for PCI-E. And the main reason I switched to Fedora was to try out Gallium3d. Right now I'm running Fedora Rawhide.

I know glxgears isn't an accurate benchmark, but I only get 500fps with glxgears. Here's what I get with glxinfo:
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV49
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.9-devel

I wasn't able to speedup a game by turning off anisotropic and trilinear filtering, and Blender (a 3d model app) has a lot of lag, even with turning down the OpenGL settings and lowering desktop resolution to 800X600 from 1024X768.

Thanks for any help.

[karo1170]

Originally Posted by downer

Is there a way to speedup Gallium3D with a custom xorg.conf or a different window manager than KDE? A new graphics card would help, since I've got a fairly old 7800GS AGP 256MB. But I would rather get this one working with Gallium3D since its more than what I need with the binary nVidia driver. Also, a newer card would mean switching to ATI or getting a whole new computer for PCI-E. And the main reason I switched to Fedora was to try out Gallium3d. Right now I'm running Fedora Rawhide.

I know glxgears isn't an accurate benchmark, but I only get 500fps with glxgears. Here's what I get with glxinfo:
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV49
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.9-devel

I wasn't able to speedup a game by turning off anisotropic and trilinear filtering, and Blender (a 3d model app) has a lot of lag, even with turning down the OpenGL settings and lowering desktop resolution to 800X600 from 1024X768.

Thanks for any help.

Do you have installed mesa-dri-drivers-experimental?

Cordialement
karo

[downer]

Yes, mesa-dri-drivers-experimental-7.9-0.6.fc14.i686.

I'm getting this error in console when launching a game:
nvfx_screen_get_param:131 - Unknown PIPE_CAP 11
nvfx_screen_get_param:131 - Unknown PIPE_CAP 63

[droidhacker]

Originally Posted by downer

Is there a way to speedup Gallium3D with a custom xorg.conf or a different window manager than KDE? A new graphics card would help, since I've got a fairly old 7800GS AGP 256MB. But I would rather get this one working with Gallium3D since its more than what I need with the binary nVidia driver. Also, a newer card would mean switching to ATI or getting a whole new computer for PCI-E. And the main reason I switched to Fedora was to try out Gallium3d. Right now I'm running Fedora Rawhide.

I know glxgears isn't an accurate benchmark, but I only get 500fps with glxgears. Here's what I get with glxinfo:
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV49
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.9-devel

I wasn't able to speedup a game by turning off anisotropic and trilinear filtering, and Blender (a 3d model app) has a lot of lag, even with turning down the OpenGL settings and lowering desktop resolution to 800X600 from 1024X768.

Thanks for any help.

500 fps in glxgears means literally NOTHING except that glxgears is working. Don't worry about that AT ALL.

Second, you don't seem to be aware of the relationships between the components of the open source drivers... you are using the NOUVEAU driver, which implements gallium3d architecture. If you upgraded to another card, i.e. AMD, you would most likely NOT be using gallium3d since ALL current AMD GPUs are best supported by classic mesa driver. The R600/700 gallium3d driver is coming along very nicely, but it isn't quite ready for your everyday use just yet. The R800 gallium3d driver is nowhere near anything -- in fact, the R800 classic mesa driver just got released a few days ago.

And more important to consider is the fact that the nouveau driver is being developed 100% without ANY support from nvidia. The devs are an amazing brilliant bunch working by reverse-engineering. You can't expect a perfectly bug-free experience out of it. What you CAN expect is that it will take care of your daily tasks, but really suck when it comes to games.

[downer]

Thank you for clearing up the ATI drivers for me. I haven't used an ATI card for Linux in several years.

I am very pleased with Nouveau for daily use. I'm also glad that the devs are working hard at adding 3D support with Gallium3D. Maybe its just too early for games/3D apps.

[hephasteus]

Blender wouldn't even work on fedora 13 with experimental drivers on a 7600GS. It's going to take a version or 2 to get it all working. It's slow because there are software rasterizers in place that they always fall back on when something isn't working so it's eating your cpu. CPU's use to do all the graphics for years and years and it was slow. It took 2 years for shading on gpu to even become mainstream with most games and engines still going to the CPU for it. Then once they finally switched everything was dark and messed up for another 6 months.
Blender probably won't be much fun on gallium stack of fedora 14 till around march or so when it will probably work pretty good.

[downer]

Yes, I saw that fewer applications worked in Fedora 13 than Rawhide, even though the version of OpenGL was listed as higher. I tried compiling Mesa for Debian a while back, but made the mistake of installing it system wide. I really am looking forward to trying Gallium3D with Fedora in the future.

[downer]

Fedora 14 with Updates-Testing and mesa-dri-drivers-experimental-7.9-0.7.fc15.i686 from Rawhide is very nice!

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV49
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9-devel
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

Blender still lags a little, and the latest SuperTuxKart from svn runs slower, but still very cool.