http://www.osnews.com/story/10311/Speeding_up_Xorg_s_RENDER Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sat, 25 May 2013 18:42:32 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? NICE!!!! Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? They claim a speed improvement of factor 3-4 when not using transformations, and 8 times otherwise! That's really great news. Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? These two are among the best programmers that the KDE/Qt community has produced. Lars wrote the bulk of KHTML and Zack's contributions are legion. Zack is now going to be working on X11 and Qt4's graphics subsystem full time and Lars already has been the main guy behind Arthur.

KDE in particular and the entire free desktop community in general are going to be on the winning side having these two devoting attention to X.org Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/978 Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Hi,

Maybe they should ask Rasterman, of Enlightenment, to take a look? *grin*

Just a thought...considering all the work he's done in this area, and his track record (eg imlib, imlib2, now the EFL etc.) And his infamous XRender vs Evas benchmark.

cya,
Victor Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Is this a speedup for all, or is this just composited things? Because I could care less about composite speed, I've never had a slow down on a geforce mx 440, so it must be decent enough. But cpu bound X could be quicker! Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Thanks for the other link. Xserver still has lots of cruft that has to be ripped out. But with Xgl, Luminocity, and other things around the corner things are looking good. Oh, and with GCC 4.0 around the corner Render should get another speedup. Search around for Keith Packard and his comments about Render and GCC 4.0.

I've been playing around with Luminocity on my gentoo partition. Impressive stuff. I love how the menus fold over like a piece of paper when opening them and the expose type stuff in the workspace windows.

But the real question is how do these Render optimizations tie into the fact that ATI still hasn't exposed any functionality in their drivers for hardware acceleration ala NVidia (RenderAcceleration)? Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I always get excited when I hear about aggressive X-related developments; hell, ANY tinkering on X catches my attention. After years and years of virtually stagnant xfree development, fervent discussions like these keeps my hopes high for the future of the free *NIX desktops. Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I thought going from Xfree to x.org would be a performance increase. I don't really care about eye candy like shadows,transparency, but one thing I did want is vsync on the desktop, Does x.org provide that?

And if one turns off the composite extension does x.org bring anything to the table that xfree doesn't? Being from the point of view of an end user. And I use nvidia binaries btw, not sure how all that ties in, but I've read that you can't use RENDER and still have opengl available for games.

Just not sure what the current improvements/limitations x.org brings to the table. Fri, 15 Apr 2005 22:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Using the following works with the (few) games that I have tried.


Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "RENDER" "Enable"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440]"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "NoLogo" "true"
# Option "DigitalVibrance" "32"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
EndSection Fri, 15 Apr 2005 23:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? remove this part

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

DRI isn't needed by nvidia. Fri, 15 Apr 2005 23:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? what is xserver? how does it relate to Xorg ? Will the former kill the latter ? Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? xserver is currently mainly a testbed for x.org development - it won't replace x.org, it might even die sooner or later... Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? NVIDIA has Xrender acceleration, wich means that all Xrender stuff in nvidia cards can be hardware accelerated, if you enable the right option in the xorg configuration file.

So, in non-NVIDIA cards, Xrender is much slower. You just didn't noticed the slowness because of this particular reason. Sat, 16 Apr 2005 04:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Weren't they moving to modular xorg development at some point? Sat, 16 Apr 2005 04:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I'm sure raster has better things to do with his time.

Though maybe a leaf can be taken from his book and this team might actually be able to produce something effective. Sat, 16 Apr 2005 06:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I put code where my mouth was and wrote some code and gave it off to ajax on #freedesktop.org a few weeks ago:

http://www.rasterman.com/files/blend.tar.gz

these routines should be able to be drop-in replacements for xrender's blending. i'm leaving it to others to integrate them into x's actual codebase - but this is the nuts and bolts. high-speed C and ASM routines here should cover a shunk of xrender paths and get some speedups. Sat, 16 Apr 2005 07:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? cool hope they intergrate them Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? NVIDIA has Xrender acceleration, wich means that all Xrender stuff in nvidia cards can be hardware accelerated, if you enable the right option in the xorg configuration file.
Unfortunately it is horribly buggy and unstable ATM. Using the most recent NV drivers (7174) with x.org 6.8.2 caused X to hard lock whenever I used Mozilla/Epiphany/Firefox for an extended period of time. Sat, 16 Apr 2005 21:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? So use 6629 instead Sat, 16 Apr 2005 23:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Hi,

are these routines from imlib2?
if render improves, would imlib2 start using render?

imlib2's blending is really great, it's astounding to see imlib blend with an alpha gradient, 30 fps, and have a really low cpu usage:
http://fopref.meinungsverstaerker.de/div/rootvis.png

(you can't count on the stuff top reports on that screenshot)

regards
Ford Sun, 17 Apr 2005 11:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I figure that for this stuff to be realy accepted you'd have to move it to OpenGL-based for the real performance enhancement...

The 2d portions of a GPU core are tiny compared to the 3d portions.. they are much more capable. Sun, 17 Apr 2005 12:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? >Unfortunately it is horribly buggy and unstable ATM. >Using the most recent NV drivers (7174) with x.org 6.8.2 >caused X to hard lock whenever I used >Mozilla/Epiphany/Firefox >for an extended period of time.

Yes,I used the 6629 nvidia drive ,but it like a shit,when I open the firefox,the firefox crashed ,the screen and key locked and screen turn to black. Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? This is being worked on, originally it was daniels and ajax hacking on this. I've started to move their work from DebriX over to xc-HEAD and it's starting to come alive

Shawn. Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Maybe if you keep piling on hack after hack over the X11 protocol, you'll finally have something halfway decent. 10 years of "hacking" indicates that is very unlikely.

And on another note: Seriously, you guys still have to edit configuration files to get stuff working? Are fonts even sorted out yet? Must be the year of the Linux desktop! Sun, 17 Apr 2005 21:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? True that config files are still involved, but they're a lot less of a failing point now. You can now have your config auto-generated most of the time, and you can even set up so that you can plug 'n' play keyboards / mice. A big part of the problem is still the whole driver issue. If hardware manufacturers contributed more, auto configuration would be a lot more dependable. Fonts I don't know much about Mon, 18 Apr 2005 03:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Maybe if you keep piling on hack after hack over the X11 protocol, you'll finally have something halfway decent. 10 years of "hacking" indicates that is very unlikely.


Obviously you know what you're talking about, and you've profiled X and found that the X11 protocol is the cause of the slowness? Weird, because people has found to be the CONTRARY Wed, 20 Apr 2005 20:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments