On 31 Jan 2009, Michel Dänzer outgrape: > On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 21:59 +0000, Nix wrote: >> On 30 Jan 2009, Michel Dänzer stated: >> >Trying current xf86-video-ati Git might be good, but my main suggestion >> >would be to try xserver Git server-1.6-branch with EXA. >> >> OK. Do I need to upgrade Mesa or anything related at the same time? >> (I'm currently on libdrm 2.4.1, Mesa a few commits past 7.2.0). > > I think that should be fine; if anything 3D related breaks though, you > can always try upgrading to Mesa 7.3. :)
I'll give it a try. >> This was a profile with XAA, not EXA. Here's a more comprehensive set of >> results [...] > > Ah, so some of those hotspots might indeed be direct VRAM access. With > EXA, does it help if you run a compositing manager, even just xcompmgr > -a? I'll give that a try as well :) >> I must say, looking at these crude benchmark results I'm wondering if >> this client-side font thing wasn't an appealing diversion. Yes, they're >> pretty, and more flexible than core fonts: but all of a sudden simply >> simply redrawing the screen has become so CPU-intensive that a screen >> scroller can peg the CPU without any real effort :( > > The EXA glyph cache introduced in xserver 1.6 greatly improves rendering > of client side fonts - some people have reported in excess of 5 million > glyphs/s on beefy Radeons. Unfortunately there are still a couple of > cases it doesn't support well in xserver 1.6, hopefully we can fix those > for 1.7. Excellent! :) >> > To avoid a1 pictures, you could try using anti-aliasing everywhere, i.e. >> > don't choose any bitmap fonts and don't disable anti-aliasing for small >> > font sizes. [..] > I think a big part of the motivation for client side fonts was indeed > anti-aliasing, so if you don't want AA and core fonts are faster for > you, just use core fonts? That's Not really practical, because they involve different APIs, different font matching mechanisms, and so forth: they aren't really interchangeable. I don't think an attempt to convince the KDE hackers to allow konsole to use core fonts would go very far, not least because core fonts are generally seen as obsolescent (`fix the slow X server', they'd chorus). And I'm not aware of any decent tabbing terminal emulators that use core fonts: certainly none that also allow DCOP automation, which I use all the time... Jim's comments here are, as ever, apposite :) _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg