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#1 2017-02-05 17:24:59

xan1242
Member
Registered: 2014-04-13
Posts: 7

[SOLVED]Mobility Radeon HD2600 poor performance with OSS driver

I know, it's an old GPU but I still can't believe that CS 1.6 barely scrapes 45FPS with the open source radeon driver, while it runs perfectly fine with the old fglrx driver (100+ FPS). Disabling the framebuffer objects (-nofbo) in hl_linux helps a bit (50+ FPS) but it's still not good that I have to do that at all.

I'm not willing to use the old driver anymore as it just presents more and more issues. I wanted to mainly do some CPU tests with CSGO and some other games on Steam but this just really irritates me. (CSGO glitches out with the old fglrx)

Currently I'm on the linux-lts branch (4.4.47-1-lts) and I tried configuring Xorg in various (DRI2, DRI3, glamor, EXA) to no avail. Checked the clock speeds, usage and temperature with GALLIUM_HUD and according to it, it's 100% utilization at max speed (500 MHz core, 600 MHz memory) but the temperatures were quite low for my laptop hovering around 50°C.
There are no particular steps, by the way, I only just installed the driver package (xf86-video-ati) and did nothing else with it.

Or is it just that these old chips aren't very well supported? I wouldn't be too surprised if that were the case.

Last edited by xan1242 (2017-02-08 23:08:37)

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#2 2017-02-06 12:12:56

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,868

Re: [SOLVED]Mobility Radeon HD2600 poor performance with OSS driver

powermanagement options could cause this.

run dmesg | grep radeon  , it should list something about kernel modesetting enabled as well as initialising dpm .


check the power_dpm_state and set power_dpm_force_performance_level to high.
see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AT … management for the exact commands.


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#3 2017-02-08 14:24:06

xan1242
Member
Registered: 2014-04-13
Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED]Mobility Radeon HD2600 poor performance with OSS driver

Hey thank you for replying! Sorry it took me a bit long to get back to this.

Anyhow, dpm wasn't even on the first time I had the driver running (it was on dynpm) but after turning it on power_dpm_state was on "balanced" and power_dpm_force_performance_level was on "auto", after setting power_dpm_force_performance_level to "high" there was no difference in performance whatsoever. power_dpm_state on "performance" didn't do anything either.

Output of dmesg | grep radeon:

[    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts root=UUID=a3c9b27e-ebe0-4f29-872a-7e5b3028fa1c rw quiet radeon.dpm=1
[    0.000000] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts root=UUID=a3c9b27e-ebe0-4f29-872a-7e5b3028fa1c rw quiet radeon.dpm=1
[    1.746374] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[    1.750201] fb: switching to radeondrmfb from VESA VGA
[    1.755013] radeon 0000:01:00.0: VRAM: 256M 0x0000000000000000 - 0x000000000FFFFFFF (256M used)
[    1.755022] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GTT: 512M 0x0000000010000000 - 0x000000002FFFFFFF
[    1.756296] [drm] radeon: 256M of VRAM memory ready
[    1.756300] [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready.
[    1.771205] [drm] radeon: dpm initialized
[    1.791408] radeon 0000:01:00.0: WB enabled
[    1.791421] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fence driver on ring 0 use gpu addr 0x0000000010000c00 and cpu addr 0xffff880037293c00
[    1.792510] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fence driver on ring 5 use gpu addr 0x00000000000521d0 and cpu addr 0xffffc900010121d0
[    1.792531] radeon 0000:01:00.0: radeon: MSI limited to 32-bit
[    1.792645] radeon 0000:01:00.0: radeon: using MSI.
[    1.792709] [drm] radeon: irq initialized.
[    3.333030] fbcon: radeondrmfb (fb0) is primary device
[    3.593476] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device
[    3.620183] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.43.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0

Disabling dpm didn't help either. And I should mention that I do have early KMS enabled too.

EDIT: To confirm that power management indeed works, setting power_dpm_state to "battery" and power_dpm_force_performance_level to "low" decreases the framerate and the clocks in the gallium huds decrease.

EDIT2: This is weird, I decided to try another distro (Antergos) for the heck of it to see what will happen. From the live USB it used the "profile" power method (possibly due to something else managing the power?).  Setting the high profile didn't help with sluggish performance at all. Which is a shame, really, I'm sure that this GPU is more than capable of running Gnome Shell.

Last edited by xan1242 (2017-02-08 22:54:34)

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#4 2017-02-08 22:57:33

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,868

Re: [SOLVED]Mobility Radeon HD2600 poor performance with OSS driver

Looks like everything works as intended, with dpm / open source driver these amd cards reach their max performance[1].

Frankly , if you indeed get 40% of catalyst performance, the oss driver is doing much better then i would expect .

[1]
If you want to be sure the card does use dpm, boot with radeon.dpm=1 .

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2017-02-08 22:58:41)


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#5 2017-02-08 23:07:28

xan1242
Member
Registered: 2014-04-13
Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED]Mobility Radeon HD2600 poor performance with OSS driver

Oh, I see, that's too bad then. Well time to steal some hardware documentation! wink /s

Thank you for your help! I really didn't expect getting this kind of performance as standard for OSS drivers. Then it is just as I feared, these chips really do need fixing/enhancements in the driver.
Well, either that or hacking up the old driver to support KMS. I hope to help with this someday! I'm not familiar with driver development in Linux yet so if I ever do get the chance, I will try to lend a hand!

Last edited by xan1242 (2017-02-08 23:11:30)

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