XSCHEM GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE CONSIDERATIONS
For 2D graphic workloads software rendering on framebuffer device is the fastest option on almost all
laptops i have tested xschem on. The only exception is the little Samsung N220 due to the slow
and tiny Atom N450 CPU.
Framebuffer graphics is also the most precise and reliable since the X11 specification
has exact rules for pixelization/rasterization of primitives.
All drawings are thus exactly identical down to the pixels on any machine using fbdev.
Following table summarizes the test times for a xschem BIST routine, doing lot of
graphic (among other) operations.
HOST CPU GPU X11 Driver Test time [s] ======================================================================================================= Asus F556U Intel core i7-7500U Intel HD 620 fbdev 19.8 -best- Asus F556U Intel core i7-7500U Intel HD 620 modesetting 28.7 Asus F556U Intel core i7-7500U Intel HD 620 intel 20.6 Samsung N220 Intel Atom N450 Integrated N450 fbdev 96.5 Samsung N220 Intel Atom N450 Integrated N450 modesetting N/A Samsung N220 Intel Atom N450 Integrated N450 intel 95.0 -best- Samsung R540 Intel Core i3 M 380 AMD/ATI Radeon HD 54xx fbdev 31.9 -best- Samsung R540 Intel Core i3 M 380 AMD/ATI Radeon HD 54xx modesetting 64.3 Samsung R540 Intel Core i3 M 380 AMD/ATI Radeon HD 54xx radeon 32.3 HP Pavilion DV6000 Intel Core Duo T5450 NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS fbdev 41.5 -best- HP Pavilion DV6000 Intel Core Duo T5450 NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS modesetting 216.1 HP Pavilion DV6000 Intel Core Duo T5450 NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS nouveau 41.6
Following video
shows the testing in action (OS: Devuan/testing, Arch: amd64):