Gaming performance using ATI r200 equipment

[chance2105]

All,

I've been using a PCI-E Radeon 850Pro for a few weeks .. while fast when it works, it's a drag when a game or app want accelerated extensions the r300 driver doesn't implement .. or a drag when it just plain hangs.

A friend of mine is running a portable with a chipset supported by the r200 driver. It's a much, much less capable card and computer (radeon 7000 igp) and he's running Ubuntu .. but it's cool to see screensavers and games "work" on his box when they choke on mine, and he has no issues with X hangs in various 3d apps .. eg, he doesn't recall ever having to hard-reboot the machine due to X hangs.

I'm entertaining the idea of bumping back to a r200-based card.

The only issue here, is what will my performance be with games? My experience with the r300 aren't exactly positive - WoW under Wine for instance would work relatively well .. until you got any expanse of landscape or any time you had several other characters onscreen, then you'd drop to silly-slow framerates.

I'm thinking a card that (1) doesn't consistently hang my box, and (2) even though overall a lower performer, but performs better over a more wide range of GL extensions, may be a better choice here.

What experiences are out there with, say an ati 8500 / 9100 / or 9200 are out there with modern games?

[colo]

I used to play the Clanbase Euro B Finals of Quake 3 Rocket Arena under GNU/Linux on a Barton 2400+ w/ a Radeon 8500LE with free drivers Those yield about 200fps on the mentioned setup with tweaked settings.

Wa§soW also seemed to work rather well. Did not try anything else though, except a few other Quake 3 Mods (like True Combat).
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[Sadako]

I'm not a gamer, so I don't know how much help I can give you, but when putting my system together I did specifically go for the best radeon card supported by the open source drivers, and I've been very happy with it.

If you are going to go with this, go for a 9250, and make sure it's a 128-bit rather than a 64-bit model.
Also, they are available with either 128 or 256 MB vram, however the 256 MB cards are just 128 bit chips with an extra 128 MB vram added by the vendor.
I've only been able to get Xorg to use 128 MB, however I'm pretty sure there is a way to get it to use the other 128 MB by manually specifying the pci address
(I was able to set up the extra 128 MB as a ram disk, which was kinda cool).

As to the cards performance, I can get up to 3000 fps in glxgears, but this is running at 1680x1050.
(I know, I know, glxgears isn't much of a benchmark, but it's all I got).

HTH

Edit; another nice thing is that 9250's are considered budget cards now, so you should be able to pick one up cheap.
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[tuppe666]

Funny you should be talking about performance on the R300

http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ it seems the matter is started to be looked at seriously

[chance2105]

The journal seems to miss an important point: missing extensions.

For instance, on my card, some forms of the Solarwinds screensaver run very alow (5 FPS, maybe). This is the screensaver I noticed on my bud's machine - his IGP solution rendered those same forms of Solarwinds like a champ with free drivers.

Doom3 on Linux using the r300 drivers doesn't run unless you change the default way it renders. Doom3 also hangs my box after about one or two "door-open" motions consistently. Compiz hangs intermittently (once an hour, once every other day, you pick..) Just now, viewing screensavers and changing between them, I hung my box.

X hanging is a serious boo-boo for me.

I'm going to replace my motherboard and video card and go back to a R200 series card. Less hassle for now, and it's only a couple hundred bucks to build another system with a similar setup (amd x2 processor running 64-bit arch) that I can SSH into and see if I can get good information to forward on to the r300 devs.

Newegg has nice fanless 9250's with 256MB of onboard RAM .. here I come..

[chance2105]

Alright .. the new motherboard and video card should be here by the weekend. w00t!

<easily entertained by hardware aside>

This is a great opportunity to do some serious benchmarking!

For instance:

doom3
benchmarking average time to hang, with >10 minutes meaning infinity

World o' Warcraft
is it playable? ... as I haven't gotten this "workie" on gentoo as of yet, this might not make my quick two-hour bench session this weekend

Warsow! Warsow! Warsow!
and it's closely-related cousin: Temulous

Solarwinds
trophy goes to card that can render all versions of it at >5 FPS. This also goes for Euphoria, Fieldlines. Guess which GL Extension is missing for each!

Skyrocket
This is the only more-serious bench I can think of. You'd think my x850Pro could do this one 60FPS up and down no problem ...

glxgears
because a benchmark isn't a benchmark unless you benchmark the non-benchmark


I wonder if there are any really good benches I can run that represent something useful ..

[chance2105]

Here we go. Note that everything here, especially the game results, are coming from a *very* casual gamer. "Smooth" and ">60 FPS" means .. looks smooth to me.

Common parts between the systems:
AMD X2 5200 (2MB cache)
2GB DDR2 800
... and everything else. HDD was the exact same Gentoo install.

The x850 setup:
Asus M2N-MX motherboard
ATI x850 Pro PCI-E x16

The 9250 setup:
MSI K9MM-V
ATI 9250 256MB AGP 8x

All tests run at fullscreen 1280x1024, 24-bit color bit-depth unless otherwise noted.

RESULTS:

Screensaver Euphoria - no FPS output - cards behaved almost exactly the same here.
Presets Regular, Grid, Cubism, UHFTEM were redered smoothly (~60 FPS)
Preset Bad Math, M-Theory, Nowhere, Echo, and Kaleidoscope: rendered with no acceleration (2-3 FPS)

Screensaver Flux: both rendered similarly smooth

glxgears - run with the default window size, fastest result gathered:
x850Pro - 5043 FPS
9250: 1504 FPS

Screensaver Sproingles - set to use the maximum number of objects, and fastest rendering:
x850Pro: ~235 FPS
9250: ~105 FPS

Screensaver Skyrocket - set to the maximum number of rockets, no FPS output
x850Pro: Smooth part of the time, drops to ~5 FPS during busy sequences
9250: Smooth less of the time, drops to ~5 FPS during busy sequences

Screensaver GL Matrix - set to the maximum number of objects
x850Pro: 135-164 FPS
9250: 71-83 FPS

Screensaver Gears - set to planetary gear system, and fastest speed
x850 Pro: 396-415 FPS
9250: 158-167 FPS

Screensaver Bouncing Cow - set to "herd" and fastest speed
x850 Pro: ~107 FPS
9250: ~59 FPS

Screensaver Endgame - set to fastest speed
x850Pro: ~65-80 FPS
9250: ~35-38 FPS

Screensaver Engine - set to v12 engine, fastest speed
x850Pro - ~180-213 FPS
9250: ~55-65 FPS

Game Tremulous - 1208x1024, 32-bit depth, fullscreen, high detail, trilinear filtering enabled
x850Pro: ~14-90 FPS, Ave ~75 FPS
9250: ~10-80 FPS, Ave ~50 FPS
Note: The x850 appeared to slow down the most when a gun that had a payload that appeared like a raygun was fired. The 9250 didn't seem to slow down in that scenario. The 9250 seemed to do better sometimes in crowded situations with a lot of action.

Game Warsow - set to 240FPS max
x850Pro: Max 240 FPS, Min 62 FPS, average ~180 FPS.
9250: Max 75 FPS, Min 21 FPS, average ~45 FPS
Note: Here again .. a gun with raygun-like payload slowed the x850 Pro down the most.

Screensaver Fieldlines - default configuration, no changes made
x850Pro: ~8 FPS
9250: > 60 FPS

Screensaver Flying Toasters - fastest rendering, most objects
x850 Pro: ~96 FPS
9250: ~110 FPS

Screensaver Solarwinds
x850 Pro: Presets Regular, Undertown: >60 FPS .. Presets Cosmic Strings, Cold Prickles, Space Fur, Jiggly: 2-3 FPS
9250: All presets >60 FPS

Screensaver Carousel - high framerate
x850 Pro: ~2 FPS
9250: ~165 FPS

Screensaver Blocktube - fullspeed, textured
x850 Pro: ~23 FPS
9250: ~75 FPS



--


Looking at the results .. my thoughts originally on missing extensions in the x850 are probably accurate. The 9250 rig never hung, but the x850 Pro rig hung three times during the testing. It's interesting to see how the closely the 9250 and the x850 perform sometimes in the scenarios where the x850 outperformed the 9250. It's also interesting to see how the 9250 outperformed the x850 on the blocktube screensaver .. no complete smackdown, but the 9250 did clearly outperform the x850.

In the end, the x850 is a better gaming card most likely. The 9250 doesn't initially appear to accelerate enough more extensions to switch for gaming purposes. I haven't put my guts to Doom3 or WoW yet on the 9250. The 9250 performs well enough for casual gaming. The 9250 wins out for me, completely, in the practicality department .. this rig seems not to hang.

The results are really interesting .. there's a lot of room for improvement in both the r300 and the r200 drivers it looks like.