Sloow blender on FreeBSD (vs Ubuntu)

[Mathias Picker]

Hi all,

the last days I tried to get blender into working state on a 2nd 
gen Thinkpad X1 Yoga.

tl;dr

blender is stuttering and jerky on my X1 running an I7-8550U / 
UHD620 (4-core, 2/4Ghz) and FreeBSD, while it works like a charm 
on my Surface Go Pentium Gold 4415Y/HD615 (2-core, 1.6Ghz) with 
Ubuntu.
This is both on 12-STABLE and -CURRENT. It’s a bit better on 
-CURRENT, but still horrible.

Is there any way to speed blender up on FreeBSD?


Long version:
I wanted to try out blenders Grease Pencil, up until now I only 
used blender for video editing.

GP or rotating 3D-Scenes in blender 2.90 on 12-STABLE was 
abysmally slow and crashed repeatedly after a few strokes with 
grease pencil or a few minutes work in the 3D-view with:
Jan  4 23:04:17 Danton kernel: drmn0: GPU HANG: ecode 
9:1:0x87f99eb9, in blender [100824], hang on rcs0
Jan  4 23:04:17 Danton kernel: drmn0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on 
rcs0

The GPU reset did not work, machine hangs, reboot via ssh.

Recompiled blender, tried older version, all with the same result, 
although 2.8x seemed a bit faster, but still slow & crashes.

Searched the web, found similar problems by others on Linux, 
suggested KMS update.

So I switched to -CURRENT with drm-current-kmod (5.4 instead of 
4.5)

Same GPU hang, but here the reset works. Performance *slightly* 
better, but every hang takes about 2 sec, no way to work with 
this.

Updating X1 bios - now the error did not happen for quite some 
time. 

But still, quite slow. Stuttering when rotating the default cube 
in simple solid  or  wireframe mode. On a I7-8550U running full 
speed (hwpstate_intel with epp=0), cpu freq between 2500 and 
3900).

Installed mesa-devel：the GPU hang is back.

Recompiled blender to 2.91.0_2, mesa-devel, drm everything. No 
more GPU hang for now, but still stuttering motions, Grease Pencil 
strokes hang back 1-2 seconds from my stylus.

Then I tried my 1st gen Surface Go 8Gb running Ubuntu: Blender is 
blazing fast for these simple tasks. Fluid rotation, allmost real 
time grease pencil：WTF?

This is an i7-8550U quad core running 2/4Ghz with an UHD620 GPU 
against a Pentium Gold, and the Pentium wins hands down?

I would really *love* to get blender up even only to Pentium 
speed. Blender with simple models in solid mode should *fly* on my 
X1, same with a few Grease Pencil strokes…


Any ideas, help, suggestion?

Thanks, Mathias


-- 
Mathias Picker                        
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Mathias.Picker at virtual-earth.de

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