Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 4 replies
  • Subscribers 706 subscribers
  • Views 428 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

X11 acceleration benefits overrated?

e14 Contributor

On May 11, 2012, SImon initially wrote:

 

"One thing to bear in mind is that if I reply [replace] all my acceleration hooks with no-ops, working with things like gedit and gtkperf still aren't super fast. I have a feeling that system bottlenecks may lie elsewhere."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=4649&start=58

 

On October 05, 2012, he confirmed his initial findings:

 

> b. acceleration is working

"Yes. However in the process of writing this, I've discovered that X is rarely the bottleneck. Since I doubt people will believe me I've added a mode where X runs as absolutely fast as possible (the display is completely corrupt) but you can still make out how slow the actual applications are functioning through the corruption."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=4649&start=190

  • Well, that thread is completely over my head by some margin, but it will be sad to learn that after waiting all this time for X acceleration only to find it's not all its cracked up to be.

     

    I've only just got round to overclocking my Pi (yes, i'm behind the time I  know) but running at 900 Mhz it does seem a lot faster. Still not to the level of 'Used by the average punter, they won't notice the difference from a PC' great, but then that is never going to happen anyway.

     

    From looking at the end of that thread, looks like it could be a bug elsewhere ?

     

    Steve

  • in reply to GreenYamo

    The bug mentioned at the end of the thread doesn't appear to be causing slowness,

    it just prevents Simon's code from working properly.

  • in reply to GreenYamo

    Still not to the level of 'Used by the average punter, they won't notice the difference from a PC' great, but then that is never going to happen anyway.

    lol, I'd not be so sure. IME that 'average punter' doesn't exactly have an up to date PC and has so much background crap installed that the icon tray reaches two thirds of the way across the start bar.

     

    So the Pi may well seem faster image

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    Ha, You are probably right on that.

     

    I've seen some pretty bad examples - explorer with about 15 different toolbars installed. It hurts my eyes.

     

    Someone else I know has just from from an 8 year old PC to an I5 equipped one and is surprised at the speed increase....