Writing on their personal blog, Jason Ekstrand from the Intel Mesa team has written up some information on what they've been doing to improve the Intel drivers on Linux. What they're talking about isn't exactly new, since the fixes are already in Mesa but it's nice to get some information about how they came across the issues and what they did to solve them.
Regardless of your feelings towards Wine, DXVK, Steam Play and so on, no one can ignore the benefits they bring to the people actually working on the drivers. Giving them so many more ways to test and push Linux graphics drivers is a good thing, as it means we can end up with much better drivers for all sorts of workloads (not just gaming!).
Ekstrand noted two specific games in the blog post, with Skyrim Special Edition originally performing like a slide-show. After some debugging with the help of RenderDoc, Ekstrand was able to find a certain draw call that was causing issues which resulted in this patch bringing the game up to a playable framerate.
They go on to talk a little about Batman: Arkham City as well which was causing GPU hangs with DXVK, after some investigation they patched the driver some more to optimize it and improve performance. The ending remarks are also nice to read:
So what's the moral of the story? It's not that bad shaders or spilling is the root of all performance problems. (I could just as easily tell you stories of badly placed HiZ resolves.) It's that sometimes big performance problems are caused by small things (that doesn't mean they're easy to find!). Also, that we (the developers on the Intel Mesa team) care about Linux gamers and are hard at work trying to make our open-source Vulkan and OpenGL drivers the best they can be.
Really good to see driver developers get stuck in to work on improving performance. You can see the whole post here, interesting stuff!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
You are talking about the Intel Xorg DDX driver. This one has nothing to do with Mesa driver.
Did you guys tried the "modesetting" driver which today is integrated into Xorg and not a separate driver like Intel, Radeon, AMDGPU, etc. ?!
I use it for any Intel iGPU system and it simply works better than Intel DDX.
Section "Device"
Identifier "Modesetting" <<<< whatever
Driver "modesetting"
Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"
Option "PageFlip" "off" <<<< currently needed for Xorg 1.20.x with enabled composite
EndSection
Last edited by johndoe on 20 September 2018 at 7:11 am UTC
RussianNeuroMancer Sep 20, 2018
Quoting: johndoeDid you guys tried the "modesetting" driverYes, because it's default.
Quoting: RussianNeuroMancerQuoting: johndoeDid you guys tried the "modesetting" driverYes, because it's default.
AND?
Whats the outcome? Does it solve your problems?
Last edited by johndoe on 20 September 2018 at 5:27 pm UTC
RussianNeuroMancer Sep 21, 2018
Quoting: johndoeWhats the outcome?Outcome described in bugreport. This bug is unrelated to DDX, issue occur on lower lewel.
Quoting: RussianNeuroMancerQuoting: johndoeWhats the outcome?Outcome described in bugreport. This bug is unrelated to DDX, issue occur on lower lewel.
Ehhh, this Artikel/Blog is from 2016.
I also remember having some troubles with modesetting years ago and setting up dual-screen with it.
But these problems do not apply anymore.
With Debian Stretch (stock Xorg 1.19.2 and stock 4.9.x kernel) there should be not problems.
And to be honest I think that a Linux user should be able/learn to compile a newer Xorg server - it's really easy.
Linux gives the user ALL freedom which Windows does NOT.
This is my opinion - nothing more.
Quoting: johndoeAnd to be honest I think that a Linux user should be able/learn to compile a newer Xorg server - it's really easy.Yeah, some of us are in it to use our computer, not fiddle with it.
Quoting: johndoeQuoting: RussianNeuroMancerQuoting: johndoeWhats the outcome?Outcome described in bugreport. This bug is unrelated to DDX, issue occur on lower lewel.
Ehhh, this Artikel/Blog is from 2016.
I also remember having some troubles with modesetting years ago and setting up dual-screen with it.
But these problems do not apply anymore.
With Debian Stretch (stock Xorg 1.19.2 and stock 4.9.x kernel) there should be not problems.
And to be honest I think that a Linux user should be able/learn to compile a newer Xorg server - it's really easy.
Linux gives the user ALL freedom which Windows does NOT.
This is my opinion - nothing more.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103229
09-14-2018 is pretty current. Compiling Xorg is not something that should be done on a normal distro, but on Linux From Scratch or something like that (Gentoo). Just compiling a small program causes dependency problems after a while. Can I compile Xorg, sure, can I compile the kernel as well, sure, do I want to spend all my time compiling all the different parts of my distro and fixing what breaks because I've got custom compiled stuff all over the place instead of using what's in the distro repo's..... no
Last edited by m2mg2 on 22 September 2018 at 1:34 am UTC
Quoting: johndoeQuoting: RussianNeuroMancerQuoting: johndoeWhats the outcome?Outcome described in bugreport. This bug is unrelated to DDX, issue occur on lower lewel.
Ehhh, this Artikel/Blog is from 2016.
I also remember having some troubles with modesetting years ago and setting up dual-screen with it.
But these problems do not apply anymore.
With Debian Stretch (stock Xorg 1.19.2 and stock 4.9.x kernel) there should be not problems.
And to be honest I think that a Linux user should be able/learn to compile a newer Xorg server - it's really easy.
Linux gives the user ALL freedom which Windows does NOT.
This is my opinion - nothing more.
My Xorg and Kernel versions both are much newer than that. 1.19.6 and 4.17
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: johndoeAnd to be honest I think that a Linux user should be able/learn to compile a newer Xorg server - it's really easy.Yeah, some of us are in it to use our computer, not fiddle with it.
Agreed (sorry for beeing late).
But having the choice to alter the situation is worth it - at least for me.
@m2mg2
This is real sad, maybe put a little more pressure and point to the fact how old this issue is. That's what I occasionally do on bug trackers - it mostly helps.
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