Cannot seem to get good latency numbers!

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4 years 2 months ago #249996 by Sray69
Once again tatel you provided a ton of great info. Although I will most likely understand it better as time goes on. But exactly what I was looking for.

I am not going to put a ton of time into messing with my system since the numbers look good enough, but I did purchase an old Radeon R7 250 2G PCIe 3.0 x16 card. My MB has an open PCIe 3.0 x16 slot so I figured it couldn't hurt to compare the numbers. And I may do a little testing at some point with the isolcpus= parameter as well. But as PCW said, it is time to move on with the build.

Thanks for all the detailed info!

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4 years 2 months ago #249998 by Bari
I doubt that you'll get much better latency scores with trying an external GPU card. The internal GPU real time issues go back to much earlier chipsets and cpus. Either your BIOS settings aren't yet optimized for real time software stepping that you are not using anyway or the BIOS is broken.

www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/fx-6300
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_700_chipset_series#760G

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4 years 2 months ago #250550 by Sray69
I found some time to test the Radeon card I bought. Can you guys tell me which looks better?
This first histogram is the onboard video card:
Onboard Video Card

This is the Radeon video card
Radeon Video Card

I had Firefox and Brave open with multiple tabs. Brave had 4 YT videos running nonstop and I had 5 GLXGEARS running at various sizes during both tests. I will admit that I was also using the computer during the Radeon test where I was not during the other. From what I can tell I think the MB test looks better but I am not sure. I hope the Radeon has good numbers because the computer runs smoother with it. Videos especially run great, even with multiple videos and GLXGEARS running. When using the onboard video card the videos are very choppy and not smooth at all. Unwatchable.

Thanks

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4 years 2 months ago #250551 by PCW
The system running the Radeon card has bad latency
=~12X worse than with motherboard video and probably
useless unless it can be fixed by some video driver setting

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4 years 2 months ago - 4 years 2 months ago #250578 by tatel
Yeah, max jitter 113 with onboard card vs 1268 with discrete radeon. So, near golden onboard vs crappy discrete.

I would suggest to you using that machine just for for CNC work unless you are really interested in watching videos while your cutter is at work. Which wouldn't be the smartest thing to do, BTW. That radeon card could be better into another machine dedicated to, say, infotainment.

However I'm really surprised to see a so big difference. Usually I get better, not worse, performance with discrete cards, even if just slightly better. So, if the discrete card is really mightier than the integrated one, it could be that you need to set something either in your BIOS or in the graphics card kernel module. If you are willing to spend some more hours learning, there is good info about setting your radeon module here:
wiki.archlinux.org/title/ATI
wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

I'm not really sure AMDGPU is privative or free. It seems to me that amdgpu is a new name for the old radeon free module, but I could be wrong. I have quite a bunch of old and also salvaged PCs but just one modern machine. You'd have to check it. You want to use the free module.

Here's the 4.19 kernel doc for amdgpu module, which lists all parameters available (please make sure you have the doc for the kernel version you are using):
www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.19/gpu/amdgpu.html

That big bad difference could come from quite a bunch of things, I'm just speculating here:

It could be that BIOS is messing things up in some way, you should make sure the integrated card is disabled, etc, but I think this should be done automatically.

Perhaps that discrete card needs some firmware, you can check this with "sudo dmesg | grep -i firmware"

To see any warnings about that card, you could do "sudo dmesg | grep -i radeon" and "sudo dmesg | grep -i drm"

If you don't see any warnings on dmesg output, it could be something with your xorg configuration or kernel module settings. You shouldn't mess with any xorg.conf file, however. Usually the kernel does that work fine. Shouldn't that be the case, you'd be seeing something on dmesg output.

You could try some kernel boot parameters for radeon driver. Perhaps power management, video acceleration, pcie_gen2/3... dmesg output should give you clues about what's going on. You'd be on for some hours of linux graphics learning there, and it could make you feel really frustrated.

So, having almost fine latency with the integrated graphics card, again I suggest to you using that computer just for CNC work with the integrated graphics

 
Last edit: 4 years 2 months ago by tatel.

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4 years 2 months ago #250630 by Sray69
Thanks for the info guys. Although I would love to try and get the Radeon card to work, since I did spend money on it, I will probably wait and mess with it later. I just wanted to see if I could improve things a little since the general consensus is that onboard video usually has bad latency and that dedicated Radeon cards usually have good latency. It was worth a shot I guess.

I plan to only use this PC for the CNC for the most part. I have plenty of other PC's in the house so no need for another one. So I guess the video card will probably just go into my used PC parts bin.

I am curious if someone can tell me how to find out what video drivers I am using and how to switch the drivers. Some other OS's have GUI's that allow you to manage this. I cannot find anything like that in Debian.

I ran
Code:
apt search radeon
 
and it came up with this

firmware-amd-graphics/testing,now 20210818-1 all [installed]
  Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips

libdrm-radeon1/testing,now 2.4.112-3 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  Userspace interface to radeon-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime

librocm-smi-dev/testing 5.2.0-2 amd64
  ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) library headers

librocm-smi64-1/testing 5.2.0-2 amd64
  ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) library

radeontool/testing 1.6.3-1+b1 amd64
  utility to control ATI Radeon backlight functions on laptops

radeontop/testing 1.4-1 amd64
  Utility to show Radeon GPU utilization

rovclock/testing 0.6e-7+b1 amd64
  utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card

xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu/testing,now 22.0.0-2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  X.Org X server -- AMDGPU display driver

xserver-xorg-video-ati/testing,now 1:19.1.0-3 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI display driver wrapper

xserver-xorg-video-radeon/testing,now 1:19.1.0-3 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI Radeon display driver

But I do not know which driver is being used currently or how to try a different driver.

Oh yeah, I have another question. When I was running a latency test (over night) with the onboard video card, when I checked it in the morning it had crazy numbers (+50M) for each. I have seen this in at least 3 separate tests. It seems like something crashes causing latency to go through the roof. Is this something that I should be concerned with?
Latency Test


 

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