673699 - Rendering is slower on some pages with nouveau driver (was fine with nv)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Benoit Friry]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0 Iceweasel/6.0
Build ID: 20110715184622

Steps to reproduce:

I go to www.liberation.fr or I zoom on Google Maps (satellite view).


Actual results:

Rendering is slow.


Expected results:

Rendering should be at least as fast as Galeon 2.0.7 (on the same X session).

I'm on Debian Testing, running a 2.6.39-3 kernel with *nouveau* driver. I think rendering is slow since I change from *nv* driver to *nouveau* driver.

Safe mode do not change anything.

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Please post the graphics section from about:support

Comment 2

[Benoit Friry]

Adapter Description
GLXtest process failed (exited with status 1): X error occurred in GLX probe, error_code=9, request_code=55, minor_code=0

WebGL Renderer
Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

GPU Accelerated Windows
0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

Mmmmm....
From a quick search, seems to be a trendy issue at this time! ;)

May be useful:
$ glxinfo | egrep vendor\|renderer\|version
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.10.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

Probably duplicate from bugs 589546 (and 667439), and maybe from 659932. Slowness is the consequence of software rendering w/o OpenGL.

Comment 3

[George Carstoiu]

(In reply to comment #2)
 
> WebGL Renderer
> Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.
> 
> GPU Accelerated Windows
> 0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

> Slowness is the consequence of software rendering w/o OpenGL.


Well I think you found the core of the issue. With the "nv" driver everything worked fine or did you also have problems?

Comment 4

[Benoit Friry]

I do not remember such slowness with nv driver. No other problem.

Comment 5

[Benoit Friry]

Is there a chance this issue to be resolved?
Is there a way to get round?

- nv is no more packaged in Debian.
- my GeForce FX 5700 (NV36.2) is only compatible with nvidia driver <172 (firefox needs >257.21, see  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers).

Is the only option to downgrade firefox or my distro?

Thanks.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

I don't think you should worry about the message "GPU Accelerated Windows
0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues." or not having the >257 driver.
The only thing upgrading to that will bring you is WebGL. Even the "accelerated layers (windows)" are not enabled on linux.
Anyway, all the HW acceleration is only aimed at making FF faster that other browsers. If your card can't accelerate it, it should be as fast as other browsers (in graphics operations). Of course, the layout computing/compositing operations may be differently fast. If rendering was good with nv driver, but it is slow with noveau I would first look at the driver. I imagine nv was old but polished with regard to 2D operations (which FF needs). nouveau is quite new. Can you contact the nouveau developers what that say about this?

Comment 7

[Benoit Friry]

> "If your card can't accelerate it, it should be as fast as other browsers".

Unfortunately, no : Galeon 2.0.7 (based on Gecko 1.7) is much faster than FF, in the same session (same computer, xorg 7.6, kernel 3.1.5).

Comment 8

[Andreas Eibach]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #6)
> I don't think you should worry about the message "GPU Accelerated Windows
> 0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues." or
> not having the >257 driver.
> The only thing upgrading to that will bring you is WebGL. Even the
> "accelerated layers (windows)" are not enabled on linux.
> Anyway, all the HW acceleration is only aimed at making FF faster that other
> browsers. If your card can't accelerate it, it should be as fast as other
> browsers (in graphics operations).

This unfortunately is NOT true!
I too have a NV36 (like Benoit, maybe we two just have a bad series? :)) and I've encountered the following problems:
Rendering is PERFECT as long as the page is not zoomed in or out. Once the page IS zoomed in or out, *and* got quite a lot of JavaScript magic going on, browsing will become a true nightmare.
It may take up to 2 or 3 *seconds* until you can scroll down or up a large page. Browser will get entirely stuck and then scroll down very abruptly in the direction you had selected.

And yes, I think the "use nv prop. driver" simply does not catch. We X11 users want to USE our systems, not just install heaps of custom packages like some silly geeks.
And it's a fact that most distros now will ONLY ship nouveau and no longer nv. And I can understand very well that people are entirely fed up with installing a proprietary driver just because the issue is so much disregarded in the Mozilla world.
Because it's not our fault that the distros we use have decided to no longer ship the nv driver. 

Just because of that getting our browsing experience somewhat crippled with all that blacklisting going on is really not the way to go IMHO.

Comment 9

[:aceman]

I am not sure what a ton of Javascript has to do with graphics acceleration... JS is not GPU accelerated...

From my experience the only platforms where having a good driver that is not blacklisted in FF brings something is Windows 7 (with Direct2D). On anything else, having GPU acceleration enabled in FF made it usually worse.

Comparing Firefox speed to Galeon is a worthwhile goal. I just argue against comparing Firefox non-accelerated to Firefox GPU-accelareted ON LINUX as I think it is almost the same (if not worse).

But I am not a Firefox graphics developer and of course the experience on your cards may vary.

Comment 10

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

(In reply to Andreas Eibach from comment #8)
> (In reply to :aceman from comment #6)
> > I don't think you should worry about the message "GPU Accelerated Windows
> > 0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues." or
> > not having the >257 driver.
> > The only thing upgrading to that will bring you is WebGL. Even the
> > "accelerated layers (windows)" are not enabled on linux.
> > Anyway, all the HW acceleration is only aimed at making FF faster that other
> > browsers. If your card can't accelerate it, it should be as fast as other
> > browsers (in graphics operations).
> 
> This unfortunately is NOT true!
> I too have a NV36 (like Benoit, maybe we two just have a bad series? :)) and
> I've encountered the following problems:
> Rendering is PERFECT as long as the page is not zoomed in or out. Once the
> page IS zoomed in or out, *and* got quite a lot of JavaScript magic going
> on, browsing will become a true nightmare.
> It may take up to 2 or 3 *seconds* until you can scroll down or up a large
> page. Browser will get entirely stuck and then scroll down very abruptly in
> the direction you had selected.
> 
> And yes, I think the "use nv prop. driver" simply does not catch. We X11
> users want to USE our systems, not just install heaps of custom packages
> like some silly geeks.
> And it's a fact that most distros now will ONLY ship nouveau and no longer
> nv. And I can understand very well that people are entirely fed up with
> installing a proprietary driver just because the issue is so much
> disregarded in the Mozilla world.
> Because it's not our fault that the distros we use have decided to no longer
> ship the nv driver. 
> 
> Just because of that getting our browsing experience somewhat crippled with
> all that blacklisting going on is really not the way to go IMHO.

Hello Andreas, please tone down a little bit. A lot of firefox developers are using Linux and we all want to have a great browsing experience that take advantage of every bit of silicon. Firefox devs do not have infinite resources, so some bugs may take a while to get prioritized. We also can't realistically allocate resources to fix nouveau if the problem is on their side. If that's the case the best thing to do is to contact the nouveau devs and provide them with a good test case and useful information for them to improve nouveau. I have done that a few times with mesa and they have been quick at fixing the bugs I reported.

Comment 11

[Paul Bone [:pbone]]

Attachment: Bug 673699 - Skip generating mipmaps with out-of-bounds base levels r=jgilbert

Comment 12

[Phabricator Automation]

Comment on attachment 9263858 [details]
Bug 673699 - Skip generating mipmaps with out-of-bounds base levels r=jgilbert

Revision D138727 was moved to bug 1743065. Setting attachment 9263858 [details] to obsolete.

Comment 13

[Paul Bone [:pbone]]

I put a patch on the wrong bug. But this can be closed, software rendering is slow.