ATI Radeon vs nVidia 3D accelleration

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 11 February 2010 12:38:38 Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> How well is radeonhd's 3D accelleration expected to work in Fedora 11?
> 
> My box at work and my box at home are both Core 2 Quad Xeons.

The idea of 2D and 3D acceleration is to take the load off the processor. So 
you should not expect the performance of accelerated graphics to depend on the 
CPU model. Not too much, anyway.
 
> lsmod shows that it's using the "nvidia" driver.  Is that the
> closed-source driver?

Yes.
 
> However while the nVideo card at work can run glxgears at a frame rate
> of 5000 FPS, my Radeon can only do 300!

The glxgears utility is not a good benchmark. Better try out some real life 
stuff like quake3, nexuiz, extremetuxracer, or such. :-) Or those more dull 
things like googleearth and compiz (if your reflexes are too bad for gaming).

> Is there something I can tweak to get faster 3D, or is this the
> expected performance for the current radeonhd driver?

Is 3D actually turned on? You can have both hardware and drivers which support 
3D, but have xorg.conf that disables it, or something like that. You can check 
for direct rendering like this:

glxinfo | grep direct

If it says "yes", then all should be well. :-)

There are probably some tools out there which measure frame rate and do proper 
serious benchmarking, but I don't know any.

HTH, :-)
Marko