Poor performance of 3D Acceleration

[Ron]

I understand 3D acceleration is still experimental, but this information might help with anyone working in this area.

I am running a Windows XP host (SP2) 2.8Ghz P4, 2GB from 2004 vintage and an NVida GeForce4 MX 440 ... old ... ( with VirtualBox 3.0.10 r54097) and have experienced the following 3D performance with glxgears in a number of Linux guests:

All numbers below are for glxgears over 5 seconds (not FPS)

Kubuntu 9.10 Release, XOrg 1.6.4, 3D accel. enabled (this is the desired target VM'ed system) Kernel 2.6.31-14-generic

480 - without VBox Guest Additions

300 - with VBox Guest Additions (slowed down?)

630 after disabling the XP host video card acceleration

KUbuntu 9.10 Release, XOrg 1.6.4 and VMWare 6.5.3

660

660 after disabling the XP host video card acceleration

Mepis 8.0.10 Xorg 1.4.2, 3D accel enabled, no Guest Additions installed

860 Watching the XP processor loading in Task Manager and top in Linux, kded seems to causing a problem. Killed it.

Now 1260

Repeat last Mepis test, 3D accel enabled installed GA's

660 with kded running

900 after killing kded (again, slower with GA's installed)

800 after disabling the XP host video card acceleration

Comparison to VMWare 6.5.3 Mepis 8.0 3b Bagside precanned version, Xorg 1.4.2

1840

1900 after killing kded (no apparent problems with kded in this distro before killing it), so improved just a bit

1700 after disabling the XP host video card acceleration

Debian Sarge - in-house version, kernel 2.6.8.2, XFree 4.3.0.1

1540 (have actually seen as much as 2000 on different days/test runs, but 1500+ typically)

1540 after killing kded

1300 after disabling the XP host video card acceleration

The VMWare sessions have very noticeably better window dragging. Mepis 8.0 can drag windows as fast as the host with no lag/blur. So the hardware can respond effectively.

What seems to stick out at the extreme's is XOrg 1.4.2 is ok under VMWare and XOrg 1.6.4 is terrible under VBox. Additionally the Guest Additions slowed down the tests and disabling the host acceleration improved performance in the first case. Something seems backwards here.

VMWare is certainly quicker than VBox, and XOrg 1.42 is seriously better than XOrg 1.6.4 (so is XFree, but obsolete), so the combination of VBox and XOrg 1.6.4 makes for a very mundane 3D performer.

I also tried real time kernel Kernel 2.6.31-9-rt with Kubuntu 9.10/VBox and it made no difference. Killing kded in Kubuntu 9.10 made no performance differences.

As there is no crash, I have not provided a log, but can on request if it would help.

[Leonid Lobachev]

First of all MX440 is really old card...and personally I'm not going trying to dig one to check it's performance, sorry.

Second suggestion is to make sure that 3D acceleration actually works on your guests. Try running glxinfo and grep it for your card name.

Here's some reference numbers for a fullscreen glxgears at 1920x1080 run on ubuntu 9.04 guest with ATI HD4850 on host:

With 3D acceleration enabled: 7764 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1552.745 FPS 7632 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1526.295 FPS 7807 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1561.364 FPS

With 3D acceleration disabled: 135 frames in 5.0 seconds = 26.856 FPS 136 frames in 5.0 seconds = 27.172 FPS 134 frames in 5.0 seconds = 26.722 FPS

I'd say 50 times is a huge difference...so 3D Acceleration works just fine.

Closing.