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AMD's open GPU documentation site

AMD's open GPU documentation site

Posted Feb 13, 2008 17:26 UTC (Wed) by jmayer (subscriber, #595)
In reply to: AMD's open GPU documentation site by tajyrink
Parent article: AMD's open GPU documentation site

> XAA and EXA 2D accelerations are now already working on R500

Well, not really or not in the way most readers would expect: They have 
been implemented in the driver, so yes, they run, but currently 
run without any hardware support. This means that anyone running XAA or 
EXA get *less* performance than someone running just ShadowFB.
See http://lists.opensuse.org/radeonhd/2008-01/msg00233.html for details.


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AMD's open GPU documentation site

Posted Feb 23, 2008 17:50 UTC (Sat) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

Where did you read 'without any hardware support' there? Both XAA and EXA would be totally
pointless in that case of course. The benchmarks where they're slower than ShadowFB exercise
paths that the driver doesn't accelerate yet (mostly related to the RENDER extension - that
can be fixed now that AMD released 3D documentation), so the acceleration architectures have
to pay a price for trying to accelerate things instead of just doing them with the CPU in
system memory in the first place. It shouldn't be hard to find other benchmarks where hardware
acceleration is much faster than ShadowFB. Which of the options works best in practice depends
on the usage pattern, so everybody has to find out for themselves.

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