glxgear and glxinfo confusion

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 23 January 2012 15:43:38 Jatin K wrote:
> On Monday 23 January 2012 03:22 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > Nothing seems to be wrong with your X setup, AFAICS. What problem are
> > you
> > experiencing?
> 
> There is no issue... I was just comparing my two laptop's performance both
> are Dell, one is core-i5 with ATI 1GB dedicated memory and another is
> core-i7  with Intel HD 3000 graphics
> 
> so just checking the performance and tried the glxgears command and seen
> the big difference in FPS

I always found the output of glxgears quite confusing, to say the least. If 
you think logically --- your screen displays a picture 60 times in one second, 
and some graphics cards (like Intel) render the frames in the same rythm, to 
display the images of the gears animation 60 times per second.

OTOH, there are graphics cards like ATI, which render cca 4000 gears images 
every second, out of which only 60 get to be displayed on the screen, while 
all others are skipped. I find this to be a terrible waste of card resources 
(and energy), without any benefit whatsoever. That is, assuming one can 
actually trust the glxgears output numbers.

And in spite of the above, people generally consider the 4000 fps to be 
"better" than 60 fps. I never understood this. But then again, one cannot 
understand everything in life anyway... ;-)

Best, :-)
Marko