Greetings.
According to http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/ExaStatus, EXA support won't be included in the next xorg release.
That patch they have on the status page for i810 ... what do I apply that to? xorg-server? Has anyone tried it yet? Is it worth it yet? I've got an integrated i915 card on my work PC. It bites for 3D, but it might just be up to this ...
EXA with i810
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- nightfrost
- Apprentice
- Posts: 293
- Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 10:56 am
- Location: Sweden
I'd love to get this working as well. The patch from that page doesn't apply cleanly to -rc3. There are rejects on i830_driver.c. I'm not sure how to interpret rejects, so I haven't been able to do anything about it. I'd really appreciate if anyone could help out with the rejects; it doesn't seem to be too hard...
- Mad Merlin
- Veteran
- Posts: 1155
- Joined: Mon May 09, 2005 7:37 pm
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I've been playing around with EXA/Composite with my Radeon 7500 and Xorg 6.9. EXA does make Composite spectacularly faster, but it's definitely still experimental for a reason.
There's a few downsides to using EXA over XAA, the first of which is that some operations are slower, in particular, antialiasing of fonts. The situation is such that scrolling in a terminal for example is much slower than with XAA. There are also some rendering artifacts at times when using EXA, not particularly annoying or major, but noticable. I've filed a bug about this already.
Finally, while EXA is much faster than XAA at Composite, it's still rather slow on resizing windows, moving translucent windows, and in general, the performance degrades noticably with the amount of stuff it has to render (ie, the sum of window space you have open). I suspect much of this would be less noticable with a gruntier card, but I don't have a gruntier card at the moment.
On the flip side, things that did work well:
- I can have EXA simultaneously on (at least) 2 X servers
- EXA plays nicely with DRI
- I can still play videos with Composite enabled (although not translucent videos)
Overall, it's cool to see, but not something I'd want to use on a daily basis, yet.
There's a few downsides to using EXA over XAA, the first of which is that some operations are slower, in particular, antialiasing of fonts. The situation is such that scrolling in a terminal for example is much slower than with XAA. There are also some rendering artifacts at times when using EXA, not particularly annoying or major, but noticable. I've filed a bug about this already.
Finally, while EXA is much faster than XAA at Composite, it's still rather slow on resizing windows, moving translucent windows, and in general, the performance degrades noticably with the amount of stuff it has to render (ie, the sum of window space you have open). I suspect much of this would be less noticable with a gruntier card, but I don't have a gruntier card at the moment.
On the flip side, things that did work well:
- I can have EXA simultaneously on (at least) 2 X servers
- EXA plays nicely with DRI
- I can still play videos with Composite enabled (although not translucent videos)
Overall, it's cool to see, but not something I'd want to use on a daily basis, yet.