What's good/expected EGL performance at 1080p?

[billgerba]

I have an application I've tested on several i.mx6 boards (duallite and qxd) running yocto jethro (with and without the latest freescale upstream patches), and I think we're hitting a GPU and/or DDR bandwidth limit somehow.

My very simple qt5.5/qml app launches fullscreen at 1920x1080 @60Hz and simply shows a single untextured rotating rectangle on a black background and benchmarked it at 60 fps. I then added a background image (keeping the rectangle untextured), and immediately the framerate dropped to 50fps. Adding a simple webpage (via a webengine instance) drops it to 30 fps. In reality, our app needs to run a few webengine instances (one big "master" instance fullscreen and several smaller ones), but we're unable to achieve over 20 fps, and that's without any kind of video or advanced HTML5 transitions or effects.

Is the expected performance level of this chip? I've seen numerous demos that appear to combine lots of media types and play through smoothly, but so far have not been able to reproduce that at 1080p (things are of course much better at 720p).

[igorpadykov]

Hi Bill

30fps is considered as satisfactory number.

It is not possible to give expected numbers as that depends on many

conditions (use case).

Best regards

igor

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[billgerba]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for the reply. We are unable to achieve 30fps doing anything useful. Are you aware of any qt/qml demo applications we can run that have been benchmarked and found to perform correctly by Freescale (or a board maker)?

[igorpadykov]

Hi Bill

one can try fsl-image-qt5 project image as described in attached Yocto Guide

Table 1. Freescale Yocto project images

Board Support Packages (29)

L3.14.52_1.1.0_MX6QDLSOLO (REV L3.14.52_1.1.0)

http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/arm-processors/i.mx-applications-process...

~igor

[billgerba]

Thanks, I will give that a try. Unless we have misconfigured something, though, I suspect that we're simply attempting something beyond what the GPU is capable of with regards to EGL, since we can't even run the qt5 cinematicexperinence demo at 30fps at 1080p.  It will start up and run at 25-31fps, but as soon as you click one of the demo movies it drops to 15fps. All is well at 720p.

[mtx512]

From our experience getting reasonable GPU performance at 720p/1080p can be very challenging mainly because the up layers of the software stack eg QT/Cario/GTK etc don't always support EGL and therefore resort to software rendering. Although in reality its a lot more complicated than that. If your intent on getting the best performance then you might find yourself rolling a lot of your own code and not heavily relying on ready to use libraries.

[billgerba]

We tried both FSL gstreamer and the community gstreamer, but it didn't make any difference. This makes sense, as our issue is not with VPU decoding but EGL rendering. Even the most basic EGL rendering (directly coded using gl api calls and vivante extensions for direct texture mapping) make the GPU usage close to 100%. Any additional GPU load (like rest of the UI) causing some frame loss/lower frame rate.

Reducing the screen esolution to 720p gives reasonably good frame rates with EGL rendering, so it looks like the GPU is simply not able to handle this task at 1080p, which is annoying. We should have paid more attention to exactly what all of those FSL demos were doing and realized that the GPU was not up to snuff for our applications.

Has anyone sampled the new(er) i.mx6 quad plus? The spec sheet says "enhanced graphics" and "improved bandwidth", but I haven't seen details on real-world implications yet.