Slow AA and RGB text rendering
I'm aware that Render acceleration of anti-aliased text has been a
persistent problem in upstream xorg for quite awhile now, but I'm
wondering if anyone knows whether there is an end in sight. The
current situation is one of severe breakage and seems to be getting
worse, not better. Here are some data points for perspective...
On the following machine:
Athlon64 3000
Nvidia GeForce 6600GT
Kernel 2.6.14, Xorg 6.9.0.dfsg.1-3
(Render enabled and verified working, Composite disabled, GLX working)
I'm getting only 22 kchar/s using: x11perf -rgb10text
Even software rendering should not be THIS slow considering that...
..For comparison, I dug out a retired P2-266 laptop with a PCI S3
video chipset. It hasn't been updated for years. (Kernel 2.6.1,
XFree86 4.2.1-16) The same benchmark reported about 17 kchar/s.
[Sidenote: for some reason x11perf -aa10text is not working in 6.9.0..
it still does RGB and reports the same result. Otherwise, I would
have reported this as well. Nevertheless, my guess is that the
result would be the same, judging by perceptible text redraw speed in
applications with AA vs RGB mode.]
Also, for reference, my prior Radeon 8500 card gave similar poor
results. Before Xorg 6.9.0, I got around 45-50 kchar/s in either AA
or RGB mode using x11perf -aa10text or -rgb10text respectively.
While this sounds much faster, it is nowhere near what it should be
and still results in visibly sluggish text redraw. I used to get
around 250-300 kchar/s with AA text in some older XFree86 releases
(and one CVS checkout of pre-6.8.2 Xorg!) with varied Radeon
hardware. (RGB was still slow, around 50 kchar/s)
If anyone has patches they'd like help testing, I'm certainly
willing. :) Performance this bad is a show-stopper for desktop Linux
IMO.
Chris
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