I am connecting from my Desktop to my laptop via ssh with X over ssh enabled.
On glxgears -printfps I normally get around 5600 or so FPS (ATI x800 with completely FREE dri drivers) using direct rendering.
With indirect rendering acceleration when connecting from my (PowerPC) ibook from my Desktop the performance is around 2600 FPS.
Previously with indirect rendering on my local desktop I would be lucky to get 300 FPS. This is a huge performance increase.
The difference is that with direct rendering your applications are accessing the hardware directly.. with indirect it has to pick up the opengl from the X server itself. Previous to AIGLX it was software rendering only.
So I decided to try out a couple games.
Xmoto -- I ran this over ssh. It's a 2d OpenGL video game. Your a motorcycle rider and your goal is to pick up strawberries then touch a flower without banging your head. A fun and addictive little game for wasting 5 minutes or so at time. The network is my machine connecting to a gigabit switch which connects to a wireless access point to my laptop. 11Mb/s speed.
I am running at 800x600 resolution and the although the menu start up is choppy the actual game is SMOOTH AS SILK. It's actually funny because the lag of the network kinda makes the mouse a bit goofy, but the keyboard response is very quick.
This is a full motion game, background scrolling with textures and quick movements and everything. It's amazing that it's this fast.
So I decided to try something a bit more beefy.
On my laptop I had 'Quetoo' which is a sort of old school-style optimization of Quake2 engine for online play. (I could compile this on my PowerPC laptop easily because no assembler code in the software renderer)
I set the network speed at 11Mb/s.
First it locked up X with the glsdl renderer.. so I tried it again with the glx renderer and that worked well. Couldn't do full screen though. Ran it at 800x600 resolution.
I tried the 'crusher.dm2' timedemo, which is a demo designed to push the hardware as much as possible with quake2 engine... and I was only getting 5fps, which was dissapointing.
So I killed that and set the network speed at 54Mb/s and ran got 16fps at the start of the demo..
So I killed it again and connected it to the wired network at 100Mb/s full duplex. This way I got 50fps at the beginning and got 17fps as the final score. Keep in mind that this is pretty intense for quake3. Probably 20 or so people in a single large room shooting at each other.
So I tried normal play and got funny mouse lag.. but the keyboard input ran with no lag.. So I am not sure what is going on.
It was maxing out at 50fps (the frame limit I had set for it earlier), so I reduced the fps limit down to 20fps and the mouse lag went away.
Then I tried argametron over the wifi network. (it's a 3d game based on the Tron light cycles from the movie) Got a smooth 60fps. Since it uses keyboard only it didn't have any noticable lag.
Next thing I tried was Blender.. a 3d animation suite. This worked realy well. No noticable mouse lag. Maybe a bit with the menus, but that was about it. Manipulating the mesh on a relatively simple model and moving around the model posed no problems at all. It was about as nice as running it locally on the machine.
It was a simple model though.. (the only one I had on the laptop)
I tried mplayer over it. It'd run on -vo gl2, but it still sucked. Obviously it's not going to magicly solve bandwidth problems. I had problems with it though playing around with mplayer -vo settings, eventually got it to lock up the machine. Beta software, go figure.
It seems like now that I play games I get initial lag as the textures are downloaded over the network, but as soon as they are in memory in my video card then it runs fine. But it's very quick at the beginning.
So now I decide to see what it's like over a high speed network. So I copy Wolfenstien over to my server on a 1Gb/s ethernet line...
And it works realy well, for what is going on.
I running high quality at 1024x768 in fullscreen. On a decently graphically intense level.. I was getting between 15 and 60fps. So I tried 'normal' quality at 640x480 and there wasn't realy a difference in speed. I set it at high quality again except at 1600x1200 resolution and it was still very playable. Only a slight reduction in performance over 1024x768.. and that's only at the high end of the scale, dropped it from 60 to about 50fps.. at the bottom it still didn't dip below 15.
It was kinda funny trying to play it with no sound though.
It should be interesting to see how well it all works with OpenGL and regular X apps using Glitz-accelerated vector based graphics.. With the shading and stuff done in hardware rather then in rasterized bitmaps it may reduce the effects of lag and bandwidth on X quite a bit..
Off to recompile some Ubuntu compiz package for debian now... I wanna wobbly windows.
On glxgears -printfps I normally get around 5600 or so FPS (ATI x800 with completely FREE dri drivers) using direct rendering.
With indirect rendering acceleration when connecting from my (PowerPC) ibook from my Desktop the performance is around 2600 FPS.
Previously with indirect rendering on my local desktop I would be lucky to get 300 FPS. This is a huge performance increase.
The difference is that with direct rendering your applications are accessing the hardware directly.. with indirect it has to pick up the opengl from the X server itself. Previous to AIGLX it was software rendering only.
So I decided to try out a couple games.
Xmoto -- I ran this over ssh. It's a 2d OpenGL video game. Your a motorcycle rider and your goal is to pick up strawberries then touch a flower without banging your head. A fun and addictive little game for wasting 5 minutes or so at time. The network is my machine connecting to a gigabit switch which connects to a wireless access point to my laptop. 11Mb/s speed.
I am running at 800x600 resolution and the although the menu start up is choppy the actual game is SMOOTH AS SILK. It's actually funny because the lag of the network kinda makes the mouse a bit goofy, but the keyboard response is very quick.
This is a full motion game, background scrolling with textures and quick movements and everything. It's amazing that it's this fast.
So I decided to try something a bit more beefy.
On my laptop I had 'Quetoo' which is a sort of old school-style optimization of Quake2 engine for online play. (I could compile this on my PowerPC laptop easily because no assembler code in the software renderer)
I set the network speed at 11Mb/s.
First it locked up X with the glsdl renderer.. so I tried it again with the glx renderer and that worked well. Couldn't do full screen though. Ran it at 800x600 resolution.
I tried the 'crusher.dm2' timedemo, which is a demo designed to push the hardware as much as possible with quake2 engine... and I was only getting 5fps, which was dissapointing.
So I killed that and set the network speed at 54Mb/s and ran got 16fps at the start of the demo..
So I killed it again and connected it to the wired network at 100Mb/s full duplex. This way I got 50fps at the beginning and got 17fps as the final score. Keep in mind that this is pretty intense for quake3. Probably 20 or so people in a single large room shooting at each other.
So I tried normal play and got funny mouse lag.. but the keyboard input ran with no lag.. So I am not sure what is going on.
It was maxing out at 50fps (the frame limit I had set for it earlier), so I reduced the fps limit down to 20fps and the mouse lag went away.
Then I tried argametron over the wifi network. (it's a 3d game based on the Tron light cycles from the movie) Got a smooth 60fps. Since it uses keyboard only it didn't have any noticable lag.
Next thing I tried was Blender.. a 3d animation suite. This worked realy well. No noticable mouse lag. Maybe a bit with the menus, but that was about it. Manipulating the mesh on a relatively simple model and moving around the model posed no problems at all. It was about as nice as running it locally on the machine.
It was a simple model though.. (the only one I had on the laptop)
I tried mplayer over it. It'd run on -vo gl2, but it still sucked. Obviously it's not going to magicly solve bandwidth problems. I had problems with it though playing around with mplayer -vo settings, eventually got it to lock up the machine. Beta software, go figure.
It seems like now that I play games I get initial lag as the textures are downloaded over the network, but as soon as they are in memory in my video card then it runs fine. But it's very quick at the beginning.
So now I decide to see what it's like over a high speed network. So I copy Wolfenstien over to my server on a 1Gb/s ethernet line...
And it works realy well, for what is going on.
I running high quality at 1024x768 in fullscreen. On a decently graphically intense level.. I was getting between 15 and 60fps. So I tried 'normal' quality at 640x480 and there wasn't realy a difference in speed. I set it at high quality again except at 1600x1200 resolution and it was still very playable. Only a slight reduction in performance over 1024x768.. and that's only at the high end of the scale, dropped it from 60 to about 50fps.. at the bottom it still didn't dip below 15.
It was kinda funny trying to play it with no sound though.
It should be interesting to see how well it all works with OpenGL and regular X apps using Glitz-accelerated vector based graphics.. With the shading and stuff done in hardware rather then in rasterized bitmaps it may reduce the effects of lag and bandwidth on X quite a bit..
Off to recompile some Ubuntu compiz package for debian now... I wanna wobbly windows.