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Hardware Based XRender Slower than Software Rendering?

Posted by michael on from the unsolved-mysteries dept.

Neon Spiral Injector writes "Rasterman of Enlightenment fame has finally updated the news page of his personal site. It seems that the behind the scenes work for E is coming along. He is investigating rendering backends for Evas. The default backend is a software renderer written by Raster. Trying to gain a little more speed he ported it to the XRender extension, only to find that it became 20-50 times slower on his NVidia card. He has placed some sample code on this same news page for people to try, and see if this is also experienced on other setups."

2 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Not enough details by bobtodd · · Score: 5, Informative
    Raster doesn't say whther he had 'Option "RenderAccel" "True"' enabled, which you must do on Nvidia cards if you want XRender acceleration.

    Here is the entry from the driver README:
    Option "RenderAccel" "boolean" Enable or disable hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension. THIS OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL. ENABLE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is no correctness test suite for the RENDER extension so NVIDIA can not verify that RENDER acceleration works correctly. Default: hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension is disabled.


    Following that option, this one is noted:

    Option "NoRenderExtension" "boolean" Disable the RENDER extension. Other than recompiling the X-server, XFree86 doesn't seem to have another way of disabling this. Fortunatly, we can control this from the driver so we export this option. This is useful in depth 8 where RENDER would normally steal most of the default colormap. Default: RENDER is offered when possible.

  2. Raster's on holiday by Rabid+Penguin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Normally, he would answer some questions or comments posted about something he has written, but he will be out of town for at least a few days.

    I highly doubt he meant for this to get wide-spread exposure beyond developers of Enlightenment or X. Since it has, this is a good opportunity. I'll make this clear for anyone that didn't catch it, raster WANTS XRENDER TO BE FASTER! If there is a way to alter configuration or to recode the benchmark to do so, he wants to know about it.

    Rather than posting questions about his configuration (which he can't answer right now), grab the benchmarks that he put up and get better results.

    Now back to your regularly scheduled trolling...