ATI FireGL X1 driver problems

I get lower performance on a FireGL X1 that on a GForce 3 ?? Can anubody explain this…

I have seen a lot of posts about driver performance on Radeon 9700. Is thsi HW faster than FireGL X1 ? Or are there just newer drivers ?

Are there any new drivers (Betas) for FireGL x1 ?

Originally posted by ToolTech:

I get lower performance on a FireGL X1 that on a GForce 3 ?? Can anubody explain this…

I think you need to explain your situation better. In what cases are you finding the FireGL slower?

I have received a number of questions from users of my software about low performance on ATI HW :frowning: I am not using any ATI extensions but i use ext_draw_array_range and compiled vertex arrays so I couldn’t really understand their issue.

I just got a ATI FireGL X1 in my post to be able to add VAO etc. I started to test a simple software with just plain tri strips and triangles and found a horrible low performance compared to my GForce 3 and GForce 4

Ok. Im an not using any ATI extensions but why is it so MUCH lower performance. It this driver related. I get about 1 M TRI per second ??

I have a 800 MHZ P III with an AGP 4x bus.

ATI drivers 6.13.10.1028

I made some tweaking. Removed the compiled vertex array extension and I get 2.5 M Tri per second. Strange that the extension makes it run slower ?? In my locked arrays I use all indices.

What performance do you get on a radeon 9700 with the latest drivers using only gzDrawArrays on tristrips ??

Do the Radeon 97000 have later drivers than the FGL 9700 ?

Aaaah Radeons & performance, my prefered topic :slight_smile:

A few things i have noticed:

  1. Performance on “basic” OpenGL is worse on ATI cards than on NVidia’s. I found 50% to not be unusual.

  2. ATI drivers are much more dependant on the CPU power than NVidia’s. I’m not surprized that you get so low performance if you “only” have 800 Mhz.

  3. ATI drivers/cards are very dependant on the number of API calls you make; basically, more than 1000 or 2000 glDrawElements (or equivalent) calls per frame will kill your performance, whereas you can get 10x times more on NVidia’s without seing a slowdown.

  4. Performance is best with VAO, but strangely i found that they optimized their driver quite a lot for immediate mode calls. Try using IM and see if it’s faster than VA/CVAs…

Y.

I agree very much on 2 and 3. I have just confirmed other results on better HW and on other data sets.