Mailinglist Archive: radeonhd (288 mails)

[Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Great work, Conn! Its always good to see people working and
experimenting with performance work.
Seems to get way too little attention in the Linux development
universe, whereas MS employs thousands of profile-monkeys doing
nothing else the whole day ;)

I know this is a bit off topic, but I wonder how much speedup
compiling the driver (and maybe the whole Xorg stack) with profile
driven optimizations would yield.
I've experimented with that lately, and beside the fact that it makes
-O3  finally useable, it yields impressive results.
Sad that distributors still mostly ignore that powerful option, and
instead decide to throw i586 support away for 1% speed gain (like
fedora did for F12).

- Clemens

2009/4/24 Conn Clark <conn.o.clark@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Matthias Hopf <mhopf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Apr 23, 09 11:24:37 -0700, Conn Clark wrote:
> > >    A little while back there was a discussion about another patch and
> > > how much coding efficiency improved speed. With a little slack time at
> > > work I decided to hot rod radeonhd's r6xx/7xx exa acceleration code
> > > and do some tests. I don't expect this patch to be accepted because
> > > its sloppy and it makes the code unmaintainable. The reason for doing
> > > it was to see what some of the potential for speed improvement
> > > actually was.
> >
> > That's a very nice experiment.
> >
> > It's interesting for me to see that there is a potential of approx. 5%
> > speed increase. It's not exactly much, and I doubt we will go for
> > problematic code (as you indicated) for this speed gain - at least now.
> >
> > There are much bigger potential speedup possibilities - the most
> > important being tiled frame buffers, then additional exa hooks. And
> > getting those !@#$% overlapping copy operations to actually work as
> > intended.
> >
> > CU
> >
> > Matthias
> >
> > --
> > Matthias Hopf <mhopf@xxxxxxx>      __        __   __
> > Maxfeldstr. 5 / 90409 Nuernberg   (_   | |  (_   |__          mat@xxxxxxxxx
> > Phone +49-911-74053-715           __)  |_|  __)  |__  R & D   www.mshopf.de
> Thanks for the compliment. I put a lot of work into this testing.
>
> Something else occurred to me too. My benchmarks are being carried out
> on a radeon HD 3100 which I think runs at 300MHz. Faster GPUs should
> benefit more from this patch than my computer did.
>
> I added a couple of percentage points to some of the improvements last
> night. One quick test indicated an improvement of 16%. I have included
> the new patch. I should also mention that the patch should also apply
> cleanly to  the current git as well as the 1.2.5 release.
>
> I would be interested in seeing some benchmarks before and after from
> people with better GPUs if anybody has some time to kill.
>
> To dangle a carrot to encourage people to try this patch, the text in
> gnome terminal scrolls by faster during compiles which is partially
> due to more cpu time being available to compile with :D
>
> --  Conn
>
> Conn O. Clark
>
> Observation: In formal computer science advances are made
> by standing on the shoulders of giants. Linux has proved
> that if there are enough of you, you can advance just as
> far by stepping on each others toes.
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