State of regnum on open source radeon drivers - Gallium3D/R600

[Arafails]

For the first time, with a patch not yet in the kernel trunk but which should make it into 2.6.39 (fingers crossed), I can load up RO without rebooting to binary failgraphix driver (yes I'm aware the l and g are the wrong way around). This is with r600g from latest Mesa git and linux 2.6.38-rc7 with r600 texture checker overhaul (ie. the latest stuff for Radeon HD 3xxx, 4xxx, 5xxx, and some 6xxx cards).



As you can see, there are still a few issues. This is on fixed pipeline because SM 2.0 support results in a black screen (textures working now so it doesn't hang the driver any more, I believe these are mostly due to errors in the driver. Hopefully soon I will be able to play on the opensource drivers with a groin, not having to look and dodgy underwear, and trees with leaves.

[NotScias]

Originally Posted by Arafails

...

Awesome news ! I have read lot of news about R600g lately on Phoronix but I didn't expect it to be so advanced now.
The last time I tested R600g on my HD4670 I had fixed pipeline working but textures weren't working at all, even by installing the lib s3tc, then I read that s3tc was unsupported on the R600g, but it seems working now as far as I can see here.

That's how it was looking some months ago when I tried R600g :





Anyways, on what GPU did you test it ?

I really hope someday I could get rid of fglrx....

[Arafails]

GPU I tested on was a Radeon 4200 IGP from the 785G southbridge. This is roughly equivalent to a 3850 discrete GPU but slower. I'd be interested to know if a better chip can run with playable FPS or shaders enabled (my black screen may be a gpu-specific bug).

The relevant kernel patch you need to get the texture checker to support S3TC is in Dave Airlie's drm-radeon-testing branch: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...756b9ea8dd387e. It applies cleanly cherry-pick'd to the main kernel tree and builds without anything else (at least on the v2.6.38-rc7 tag).

To enable GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc and GL_S3_s3tc, and thus get rid of the "video card is too old" message, you need libtxc-dxtn installed and to set an R600_ENABLE_S3TC environment variable before running RO.

For most things it works just fine, but in RO a lot is broken. Most of the bridge are invisible for one thing, and forts seem to be largely made out of scaffolding. Although, again, this could be gpu-specific bugs. Please post your results if you get around to trying it out.

[Cuchulainn]

Originally Posted by Arafails

GPU I tested on was a Radeon 4200 IGP from the 785G southbridge. This is roughly equivalent to a 3850 discrete GPU but slower. I'd be interested to know if a better chip can run with playable FPS or shaders enabled (my black screen may be a gpu-specific bug).
[...]

I tested it under Fedora 15 testing and got the same result. Shader 2 is black too.
result with Radeon 3200 IGP: http://img228.imageshack.us/i/screen...033016415.jpg/
result with Radeon 4650: http://img5.imageshack.us/i/screensh...033017174.jpg/

I get only 19 frames per second with fixed shader mode. As comparison with proprietary drivers I could get about 40 fps with shader 4.

To enable GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc and GL_S3_s3tc, and thus get rid of the "video card is too old" message, you need libtxc-dxtn installed and to set an R600_ENABLE_S3TC environment variable before running RO.
[...]

command to to set an R600_ENABLE_S3TC environment variable is "export R600_ENABLE_S3TC=1"

[Arafails]

Something I hadn't thought of trying before, but if you force safe mode stuff shows properly. On my machine it's about 25% slower than with fglrx on shader model 2.0

Also if I understand correctly (I'm sticking with the 2.6.38 release until later in .39's release cycle) the relevant patch has actually landed in the kernel mainline.

[DINAMIK]

Hi all,

I have made some test in ubuntu 11.04 (2.6.38-11) with the opensource driver (because propietary drivers is not supported anymore)

I could play regnum online without fails (by using "safe mode")

the problem was FPS. between 14 - 20.

my specs:

athlon xp 2100+ @1.73MHZ
Ati X1650 pro 512MB AGP
1GB ddr @333mhz

is there a way to improve the performance?

[NotScias]

Originally Posted by DINAMIK

is there a way to improve the performance?

X1650 is pretty old, but first try to get a fresh Mesa/driver stack (there might be some Ubuntu PPA's around), and also try to disable VSync, glXSwapBuffers and enable Color Tiling in the xorg.conf. They slightly help regarding 3D performance at the cost of getting screen tearing.

[DINAMIK]

Originally Posted by Shining-Scias

X1650 is pretty old, but first try to get a fresh Mesa/driver stack (there might be some Ubuntu PPA's around), and also try to disable VSync, glXSwapBuffers and enable Color Tiling in the xorg.conf. They slightly help regarding 3D performance at the cost of getting screen tearing.

let me explain my current situation:

name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV530
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.12-devel
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

I have created the xorg.conf and I have added this:

Section "ServerLayout"
...
Option "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection

I haven't made changes here, this was the default just FYI
Section "Module"
Load "dri2"
Load "record"
Load "glx"
Load "extmod"
Load "dbe"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "1"
Option "GARTSize" "64"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
Option "ColorTiling" "1"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
EndSection

1st question. what more I need to add?
2nd question is need to execute a command in order to this xorg.conf start to impact in my configuration? I mean. I have created it so how can I be sure that my computer is using this conf?

[Arafails]

Remove the line that says:
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

XAA is very old and EXA works much, much better. This doesn't affect RO directly, but if there are any 2D apps running at the same time (this is almost always the case), they will be causing slowdowns.
You probably don't want to be manually specifying GARTSize either.

Configuration changes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf take effect immediately as the X11 server is started. You can achieve this on Ubuntu by logging out and back in again.

Truthfully, you shouldn't expect much better performance than that anyway. The regnum online 3D engine is very intensive on features that are not well accelerated on X1000 series and earlier (or any IGP either, but that's not relevant to you).

[DINAMIK]

Originally Posted by Arafails

Remove the line that says:
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

XAA is very old and EXA works much, much better. This doesn't affect RO directly, but if there are any 2D apps running at the same time (this is almost always the case), they will be causing slowdowns.
You probably don't want to be manually specifying GARTSize either.

Configuration changes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf take effect immediately as the X11 server is started. You can achieve this on Ubuntu by logging out and back in again.

Truthfully, you shouldn't expect much better performance than that anyway. The regnum online 3D engine is very intensive on features that are not well accelerated on X1000 series and earlier (or any IGP either, but that's not relevant to you).

Hi Arafails,
I preffer to restart my computer after make changes in the xorg.conf (is it the same thing right?)

by changing the options above, I have increased the performance in 3 or 4 FPS
now the game works on 1024x768 @85mhz
with: (safemode) 17 - 22 FPS


the main difference with windows, is the VM used (just 200 MB) and the procesor use percent (between %60 and %80)

I guess I will downgrade to Jaunty or Karmic and try with the propietary drivers. Hardy gave me some issues.

In the section "device" there are a lot of options (commented) that can be added. Do you have a site where can I see how affect in the configuration and what are the values allowed?

PS: In addition, I have changed from unity to normal session (with no changes in the performance) and then I have deactivated compiz, (compostion, Opengl in compiz) (with no changes in the performance)