Guide to Get the Best Performace from the GMA 500

[Sakartu]

Hey guys 'n gals,

Let me just take this moment to report my findings with other window managers on 12.04.

I updated to Ubuntu 12.04 last week and for the first time in forever had a *good* experience with installing; everything worked pretty much out of the box, with just the suspend and black screen fixes (see bodhi.zazen's blog and/or the wiki). After trying out unity and unity-2d for a bit I installed xfce-desktop for the first time in my life and was surprised by the completeness and smoothness of the desktop. So, last Friday, I reinstalled again using the latest Xubuntu and I am as we speak a very happy Asus 1101HA user. I don't really miss the accelerated video (I only watch tv shows on my netbook and I can watch them in SD just as well) and stuff like transparency of drop down terminals (I'm a rather religious tilda/guake user) and general speed of the OS is great.

Thank you all for making this work and putting so much time in it! With the latest release you made sure my netbook can run smoothly for another year or so, before I rough it up bad enough to buy a new netbook all together

[bodhi.zazen]

Hey guys 'n gals,

Let me just take this moment to report my findings with other window managers on 12.04.

I updated to Ubuntu 12.04 last week and for the first time in forever had a *good* experience with installing; everything worked pretty much out of the box, with just the suspend and black screen fixes (see bodhi.zazen's blog and/or the wiki). After trying out unity and unity-2d for a bit I installed xfce-desktop for the first time in my life and was surprised by the completeness and smoothness of the desktop. So, last Friday, I reinstalled again using the latest Xubuntu and I am as we speak a very happy Asus 1101HA user. I don't really miss the accelerated video (I only watch tv shows on my netbook and I can watch them in SD just as well) and stuff like transparency of drop down terminals (I'm a rather religious tilda/guake user) and general speed of the OS is great.

Thank you all for making this work and putting so much time in it! With the latest release you made sure my netbook can run smoothly for another year or so, before I rough it up bad enough to buy a new netbook all together

XFCE will do transparency, without a huge performance hit.

[Anaesthisia]

XFCE will do transparency, without a huge performance hit.

I installed Xfce4 on my Nokia Booklet 3G, and it seems Youtube videos are even smoother than with Unity.
The installation brought a Debian background to my GRUB page.

A

[ingcorra]

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 with psb_gfx working (almost) out of the box. 2D performances are quite good even with metacity compositing effects. Any ideas to get the brightness keys working on my asus 1201ha? I already tried adding acpi_osi=Linux and acpi_backlight=vendor on grub with no effect. I'm using the script posted by bodhi.zazen but it would be better to have the keys working

[Anaesthisia]

So many posts, so I'm sorry if something like this has been posted already.

I am running emgd 1.10 with xserver 1.10 (oneiric) with 12.04

to provide xserver 1.10 I added the oneiric sources to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oneiric.list



I am using the emgd packages from my repo (ppa:jools/emgd-xorg1.10 but im sure the gma500 team packages will work fine with this setup.

This work is part of http://joggler.exotica.org.uk where I will be shortly releasing images for Ubuntu 12.04 and Xubuntu 12.04 for the O2 Joggler.

But what about the performance?

A

[exobuzz]

But what about the performance?

A

what sort of comparison/test do you want? 2d and 3d works accelerated, mplayer/xbmc work with vaapi acceleration (1920x1080 h264 plays back ok using mplayer & vaapi - cpu on device is just 1.3 ghz z520 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Joggler).

[godfazr]

well, today I installed 12.04 to see if it's usable... and it's not seeems to be good, at least for me.
I always get black screen after boot, though I added console=tty1 to grub config as suggested, so I always have to do Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get my desktop visible.
Brightness controls seems to work (after editing grub config), but there's no OSD both for brightness and sound controls and also there's a delay when changing brightness.
YouTube playback is worse than I had on 3.0.9 kernel that I built myself few month ago (where only change I've made was enabling psb-gfx) - I had smooth 360p in window, and now it's same as with EMGD on Natty - smooth playback only in 240p.
Video playback slow as well, but I didn't try yet with VCL or mplayer which might be faster than default player. I guess I'll stay on my Natty with EMGD, at least for movies.

P.S. In addition to gma500 problem this forum started to block my IP quite often >.

[ferry_toth]

what sort of comparison/test do you want? 2d and 3d works accelerated, mplayer/xbmc work with vaapi acceleration (1920x1080 h264 plays back ok using mplayer & vaapi - cpu on device is just 1.3 ghz z520 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Joggler).

You have my attention now. Which mplayer did you install?

I have troubles getting mplayer to work well with with vaapi on this resolution. My device is a Fitpc2 which has only a HDMI port that is connected to my TV set. A lower resolution is not an option and thus vaapi acceleration is necessary even though I have 1.6GHz.

Also, have you tried kde either with kwin or kwin-gles to get desktop effects (compositing)?

Ferry

[exobuzz]

You have my attention now. Which mplayer did you install?

I have troubles getting mplayer to work well with with vaapi on this resolution. My device is a Fitpc2 which has only a HDMI port that is connected to my TV set. A lower resolution is not an option and thus vaapi acceleration is necessary even though I have 1.6GHz.

Also, have you tried kde either with kwin or kwin-gles to get desktop effects (compositing)?

Ferry

I was using the vaapi patched one, but it seems as though I have made a mistake. Looks like emgd_drv_video for emgd 1.10 on xserver 1.10 has problems. emgd_drv_video for emgd 1.10 on xserver 1.9 seems to be ok. I must have got muddled up when testing.

I may end up using xserver 1.9 if possible with precise if there is no way to get the video stuff working otherwise.

note that mplayer + vaapi is working for decoding 1920x1080 h264 on my xserver 1.9 setup (jolios), but the actual screen res is 800x600 - so our situations are not the same. higher res more ram and so on. could be other issues there.

[bodhi.zazen]

I was using the vaapi patched one, but it seems as though I have made a mistake. Looks like emgd_drv_video for emgd 1.10 on xserver 1.10 has problems. emgd_drv_video for emgd 1.10 on xserver 1.9 seems to be ok. I must have got muddled up when testing.

I may end up using xserver 1.9 if possible with precise if there is no way to get the video stuff working otherwise.

Sounds very much like the same work around as was used for 11.10 (depreciated xorg, patched packages, mixed results, poor performance), with the same advantages / disadvantages as EMGD on 11.10.