GPU performance is...good but terrible, depending on what you need.

BrianBeuken

I've discovered something strange, after spending quite some time getting my La Frite up and running with Ubuntu mate with mali, I finally got a chance to try a few test projects. But first I wanted to test its GPU performance with GLMark2-es2 (for gles2), and I got very strange results.
Off screen it is actually quite nippy, returning a score of 277 which is not bad at all, better than a Raspberry 3B. But on screen peformance is shocking and returned a score of only 6, thats beyond bad, I'd expect it to be locked to the frame rate of 50 to 60fps or if not locked come close to the off-screen score.
I tried one of my heavy GLESv2 test projects and after installing build-essential and all relevent libs for the project it actually did really well and built and run the project.....at less than 5fps....that was surprising.
Does anyone know  why the on screen video performance should be so bad when some effort went into providing Mali 450 drivers? I was using X11 to displayb the screen.

loverpi

X11 requires a DDX driver called armsoc. This is a heavily unoptimized driver because the optimizations must be specific to each SoC's display engine. Another problem is that X11 and most display mangers are designed to render full screen rather than use tiles which GPUs are optimized for. X11 then copies the buffer a bunch of times which burns the limited memory bandwidth available. Your best luck would be to use lima with wayland or do direct rendering and not go through X11.