Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
FSAA and AF
Enabling and disabling Full Screen Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering for both cards was met with varying succes. 4X AA for the ATI cards was enabled by hand in the XF86Config file. We needed to include the additional options for our fglrx device after installing the driver properly:Option "FSAAEnable" "yes" Option "FSAAScale" "4" Option "FSAADisableGamma" "no" Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "no" Option "FSAAMSPosX0" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY0" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosX1" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY1" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosX2" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY2" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosX3" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY3" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosX4" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY4" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosX5" "0.000000" Option "FSAAMSPosY5" "0.000000" Option "UseFastTLS" "0" Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on" Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no" Option "ForceGenericCPU" "no" Option "EnablePrivateBackZ" "yes"
Pay considerable attention to the EnablePrivateBackZ option. Although documentation for that particular variable seems light, AntiAliasing refused to draw correctly without it. Without enabling that element on our tests beds, nothing would draw to the screen.
You may notice that we purposely have not discussed much about Anisotropic Filtering up until this point. There are currently no driver-level AF features in fglrx. This is a large problem with the Radeon cards in our lineup - but fortunately, we still have trilinear and bilinear filtering.
To enable FSAA for NVIDIA cards, we needed only to set the environmental variable $__GL_FSAA_MODE to 4 (AF is enabled similarly by setting $__GL_DEFAULT_LOG_ANISO). We do not need to restart X to enable FSAA or AF, which is a huge relief for us. However, attempting to find Anisotropic Filtering working correctly in a game setting proved difficult. Perhaps it was the way in which we configured our drivers, or perhaps some fluke in our testing methodology escaped us, but AF for NVIDIA cards did not work.
Since the AnandTech FrameGetter utility by default measures FPS once every second, we modified the source to take screenshots every tenth of a second for this portion of the test. After running the various benchmarks a few times, we had several hundred overlapping frames to choose some comparative screenshots for IQ testing. Below, you can see our capture of a soldier that shows two levels of anti-aliasing. Try as we could, there were no instances of one card rendering AA differently than the other. No driver cheating conspiracies today.
| None |  |
| 4X |  |
| Mouseover AA to No AA |
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There is nothing really shocking in these benchmarks. AA is behaving the same as it would in Windows. It was worth checking to make sure, though. Using the same method as above, we can demonstrate some rudimentary advantages of trilinear filtering over bilinear filtering.
| Bilinear |  |
| Trilinear |  |
| Mouseover bilinear to trilinear |
|
Again, everything here is on par with Windows demonstrations of trilinear/bilinear filtering. There were no differences between the ATI and NVIDIA implementations of trilinear and bilinear filtering; we get the same images on both cards.
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TheWounded - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Its a nice test but i would have loved to see how the XGI volari cards would have done.I'm interested if the volari's could be a good choice for linux gamers. But unfortunatly there are no linux benchmarks involving the volaris.
henca - Thursday, October 7, 2004 - link
This was a very nice comparision of mid- and high-end cards. It would be interesting to also see a comparision with low-end cards like Matrox G550, Intel Extreme graphics and the Radeon 9200 family.The good news about these cards is that they are all supported by the opensource DRI drivers. An up-to-date Linux distribution should support them out of the box without having to download and install any binary drivers.
MNKyDeth - Tuesday, October 5, 2004 - link
I am a Linux gamer only so a benchmark comparison like this is great. I really enjoyed reading it. But, imo, there was a lack of games included in the benchmark roundup. I would like to see Savage, NWN, and either quake3 or Heretic 2 shown aswell.I also do not like the showing of wineX (Cedega) benchmarks as it defeats the purpose the gaming on linux. The only way I could recomend anyone to use wineX (Cedega) is if they don't own a copy of windows. If you do own a copy of windows do not use wineX for pete's sake, just dual boot, it is the better emulator after all.
jerrysiebe - Tuesday, October 5, 2004 - link
For anisotropic filtering, I did a strings search in libGL and came up with something.>strings /usr/lib/libGL.so | grep ANISO
__GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO
Setting that, I can see a visible difference and get a FPS hit, so I believe it works. On my GF4 4200, I can set __GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO to 1, 2, and 4 and see the difference. Set to anything else I get no anisotropic filtering.
Thetargos - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Excellent article, just a comment on the NVIDIA uninstaller... it plainly doesn't work as it should. The prlblem is that it substitutes (like the ATi driver) some libraries in the system, but unlike ATi's driver, NVIDIA's driver also makes a change in one library used for the Direct Redering Infrastructure, libdri.a specifically. So uninstalling the drivers with NVIDIA's uninstaller this won't be reverted (re-install of the XFree86 package or Xorg package is required, note only the core package is need).In favor of ATi's driver, the uninstallation is much easier and the system is restored to its previous stage, restoring the backup copy of libGL.so.1.2 that is the only system library it overwrites.
plamalice - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
The Nvidia AGPgart driver is causing problems with ATI cards (perhaps other non-nVidia card as well) on both Win and Linux when used on an nForce based mobo (of course). Nforce3 (150, pro150) have both caused me problems when using an ATI card until the gart driver was uninstalled.A poor attempt by nVidia to make ATI card appear unstable ? :P
Anyways, if you have an nForce-based motherboard and an ATI gfx card, do not use nvidia's gart driver.
KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
directedition: i just symlink /mnt/cdrom to /media/dvdrecorderKristopher
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mczak - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"Keep in mind that we even run SuSE, a RPM derivative - not too different from Red Hat."That really doesn't make sense. RPM is just the package manager! If a dos version which uses rpm would exist, would you say that it is "not too different" too?
"Below, you can see a screen grab from our ATI frame buffer playing Unreal Tournament at 800x600. The image should not be surrounded by a black border, but rather, stretched to the limits of the screen."
This looks to me like you did not have configured 800x600 resolution in the Xfree config file (Sax2 will happily do that) - you cannot switch to fullscreen resolutions not configured usually with XFree/Xorg (though maybe the nvidia driver doesn't care).
btw about aniso not working: I guess you could do that quite easily with framegetter? Just intercept the filter setting calls and replace them?