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Athene 3.2 Overcomes X11 Speed Constraints

17 September 2003: Rocklyte Systems is pleased to announce that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display. The performance increase results in a more consistent and comfortable experience in desktop activity, most notably in the gaming area, as well as in everyday interface activities such as scrolling, window dragging and resizing.

At this stage we have not drawn any conclusions on speed in comparison to the KDE or GNOME desktops and look forward to user feedback on this topic.

We have also released a port of SDL-1.2.5 for Athene/X11 and Athenyx. This includes the delivery of approximately 15 new games that demonstrate the faster graphics system to full effect. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release.

The latest releases of Athene 3.2 for X11 and Athenyx are downloadable from our central downloads page.

We are also now offering a downloadable version of Athene for Linux users that want to use a total non-X11 desktop without losing their existing Linux installation. This commercial release of Athene includes the same graphics technology as the CDROM version, but in a neat downloadable 13MB package. Costs only $29.95US

TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

UPDATE: Following this benchmark, Athene/X11 3.3 has included new code that results in benchmarks of 1.29 seconds when run in full-screen mode as a superuser. This gives a speed difference of just 5% below the recorded maximum as it reduces X11 to a simple display service.

Version 3.2 of Athene utilises shared graphics memory between the desktop and X Server, giving X11 full access to window areas for the purpose of copying graphics to the display. Without a shared graphics system, the desktop is forced to either draw graphics to the X display via messaging of the image data (causing slow-down), or it can allocate graphics memory at the X Server's end (this causes problematic design issues, as direct CPU access to the graphics memory is disallowed).

Shared graphics memory resolves these issues at a cost of network transparency. In the past, the shared graphics memory technique has been utilised for specialist X11 programs, particularly in games and video playback applications. In Athene's case, Rocklyte guarantees that both the desktop and all its programs use this technique, giving a consistent level of performance in all areas. Standard X11 Window Managers are unable to make similar claims as the graphics usage of X11 programs is not controlled by the window manager (a window manager's job is to simply direct the window traffic).

The following benchmark table illustrates the speed at which 100 800x600x32 images can be be copied to the video display in each release of Athene:

OS / Release Time (sec) Speed Difference Blit Function

Athenyx 1.162 0% BlitArea()

Windows 2000 1.392 -17% SetDIBitsToDevice()

X11 (Athene 3.2) 1.621 -29% XShmPutImage()

X11 (Athene 3.1) 3.437 -296% XPutImage()

Athenyx has the most modern and optimised window rendering system of the test cases and thus tops the benchmark. Although the 3.2/X11 version still looks quite slow in comparison to Athenyx, if compared against the Windows version then it is only off the pace by 14%, which is tolerable for a raw throughput comparison. This difference is partly due to the fact that X11 is a graphics server technology, which causes additional overhead in comparison to the local graphics calls as used in the other releases.

A 'real-world' frame rate test for the Exodus game at a window resolution of 640x464 gives the following results:

OS / Release Frame Rate Speed Difference

Athenyx 50 (Time to spare) 0%

Windows 2000 50 (Time to spare) 0%

X11 (Athene 3.2) 46 -6%

X11 (Athene 3.1) 27 -46%

Although the X11 version is still behind the other display systems, the performance increase from version 3.1 to 3.2 due to the addition of the shared imaging hack illustrates roughly a doubling of blit speed.

X11'S FUTURE: THE ROCKLYTE PERSPECTIVE

Although our issues with X11 were commercially solved earlier this year in licensing SciTech's SNAP technology, we still have a research objective to release a complete X11 replacement for the free software world. We believe this is necessary for speed reasons but also general graphics support, design factors and ease-of-development issues. Ultimately we want to release a suitable, complete and viable replacement to the status quo. We'll keep you informed on progress.