Re: [9fans] ctrl radeon: not working for ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility?

["Gabriel Díaz" <gdiaz@rejaa.com>]

hello


Vesa code has some problems to deal with ati hd5750 cards here. Themouse cursor disappear when a lot of scrolling is happening,  vesa is unable to drive the card beyond 8bit depth modes or 1280x1024 resolutions. Besides that, the performance i see is almost the same i had with the radeon driver and the 9500 i had in the thinkpad, or the intel driver (given that my stress test is reading man pages and watching flickr photos. . . .)

I guess the radeon driver is unable to work with modern ati cards no?

I would love a book recommendation to learn something about graphics programming, so at least i can guess what or where to look to try to debug the problem.

slds.

gabi



----- Original Message ----
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
To: 9fans@9fans.net
Sent: Fri, April 30, 2010 2:07:07 PM
Subject: Re: [9fans] ctrl radeon: not working for ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility?

> I was curious to see how performance differs from vesa.

me, too.  radeon performance is not good with vesa.

> meanwhile, am I right if I think that the whole graphics math is done
> on cpu (I mean - not on gpu), so the faster the cpu the better vesa
> (and any) driver performance?

cpu speed seems to have little to do with it.  the main slowdown
is reading from the hardware framebuffer, which plan 9 does a lot.
on many modern cards there is no phsical framebuffer.  it's
constructed by firmware (perhaps running in smm mode on the
cpu) on-the-fly.

> Proprietary drivers use gpu and many
> things built in the graphics controller and so they unload the cpu.
> Plan 9 drivers are there to initialize and set up the device, scroll
> and fill and this is, basically all, right? If this is so, the brute
> force through powerful cpu + vesa is easiest solution, the way to go.

i think it's mainly a question of getting the best graphics
performance.  but these days the 2d accelleration (especially
for radeon) is fairly poor.  i'd love to have my nvidia mx400
back with a pcie interface.

- erik