[Gllug] Glxgears

[Nix]

On 4 Feb 2011, Daniel P. Berrange spake thusly:

> The FPS glxgears reports is a measure of how fast the driver
> sends frames to the screen. The fact that you see 59 FPS is
> simply an indication that the driver is artifically limiting
> itself to match monitor's vertical refresh rate. This is good
> for normal usage because it avoids visual tearing during screen
> updates, but it makes glxgears useless as a benchmark tool

glxgears is useless as a benchmark tool anyway. The stuff it's
benchmarking just isn't what 3D apps do.

The easiest way to benchmark real 3D apps is to try some. :)

>> However, googling for similar data I came across sites
>> reporting 2000+ FPS.
>
> Which would be the case for drivers which aren't limiting
> themselves to the vertical refresh rate

In general, among free drivers, KMS drivers do such limiting: non-KMS
don't. Nonetheless KMS drivers are better along pretty much every
dimension (other than the 'works on non-Linux X servers' one).
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug