Poor OpenGL performance with Mesa3D and Intel

[Dorsai!]

Hallo,

I've got an Acer Aspire One, which has a Intel GMA 945 chip.
I installed it using the "intel" VIDEO_CARDS Flag, so all necessary packages are up and running (i suppose) after getting xorg to run.
I also did all intel graphics specific tweaks in the xorg.conf file.

But when I run glxgears, I get framerates of about 62 fps, which absolutely incredibly sucks.
In actual games like Nexuiz and Half Life (through wine in opengl mode) I get about 5-10 fps.
I know that these games are normally playable on the AA1. Other AA1 users also have fps of about 600-900 in glxgears, which is about 10 times what I get.

When I looked at the cpu usage in top, I see that glxgears is only using 5%. that explains why 62fps is all I get.
So why doesn't glxgears use free CPU cycles?

I hope someone can tell me whats missing or wrong.

[szczerb]

1. It should only use 100% CPU if you use software rendering (which you don't want) or have a GFX card way too fast for you CPU (which is not possible as the 945 is really slow...).
2. You get around 60fps because you have sync-to-vblank enabled - so only as many frames as drawn as can be diplayed (due to your refresh rate). This way there is less tearing as all frames are ready when they should be and you use less power. (you can disable it with driconf but I don't see a reason - if it changes anything it'll make it less fluent)
3. version of xorg-server, mesa, kernel and intel driver?

[Dorsai!]

Thanks for your reply.

1.Isn't the mesa part of the driver some opengl extension which simulates the opengl functions, that the chip doesn't support in software?
Also shouldn't this be the other way around (Usefull when a CPU is much faster than the GFX-Chip)?

2.That explains the framerates in glxgears and the CPU usage, but the poor performance in even the simplest games (not only 3d, but also 2d like in the zsnes emulator or fallout2).
basicly everything that uses opengl in at least some way is unbearable slow.
ZSNES is good example, because it has also video modes without opengl. And it runs perfectly fluid in those (all software-rendered) modes.

3.
xorg-server: 1.5.3
mesa: 7.2
gentoo-sources: 2.6.28
xf86-video-intel: 2.5.1-r1

exept for the kernel ebuild version everything should be absolutely up-to-date.

[szczerb]

1. Mesa does all OGL rendering and it uses HW when it can (when the driver supports it). Generally speaking even a very slow GFX card is way faster at software rendering then a fast CPU. What I meant in the end of the sentence that if you have HW rendering set up correctly and use 100% CPU when doing just graphics then your GFX card is fast enough to take data faster then the CPU can give it. More or less ;]

2. Yes support for intel is currently pretty bad performance-wise but it's good feature-wise. It used to be faster and it will be faster - right now is a shit-hole time ;]

3. That's what I use with my GM965 (except I have .28-r1 kernel and -r1 xorg-server). Either downgrade a lot (and it will be a dependancy hell probably) or just sit back (as I do) and wait first for xorg-server-1.6 and finally kernel 2.6.29 and xorg-server-1.7 which should have full support for GEM and KMS and should both feature-complete and faster.

[Dorsai!]

Thank you. Nearly all questions answered.
But what do you mean by downgrading. I guess I wouldn't do it anyway, but would it actually help? Is there a version that is better performance-wise?

[szczerb]

I don't really remember. Maybe just server-1.4.2 and intel-2.4.2-r3 or maybe all the way to stable...I don't remember the versions pairs ;] I got the laptop with intel a few months ago and went ~arch pretty fast. Never looked back since server-1.5 and intel-2.5 ;] Although I think compiz worked a bit better with 1.5.2 then now with 1.5.3 ;]