On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:12 AM Polarian
Hello,
So the ArchWiki can be very confusing about this all, and I am sure a lot of people will just install every package and will just hope that it does something, but I would like to actually understand it, so sorry for the ML noise, I would like some clarifications from those who are knowledgeable about this topic.
So reason I got a new Laptop with alder lake, and I am trying my best to optimise it, I dropped 70% battery in just 2 hours when its a 73wh battery, that is absurd, so I checked the two following which is recommended to improve performance and battery life:
1. 3D acceleration is in use 2. Hardware video acceleration is in use
As for 1, it was by default, however the ArchWiki on the xorg page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Driver_installation) lists the following driver to be installed for xorg:
xf86-video-intel
Actually, xf86-video-intel is not really recommended for most people: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Installation Make sure Early KMS is enabled. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting#Early_KMS_start
Now running glxinfo before the installing of said package, direct rendering is enabled (DRI), which would indicate that 3D acceleration is working as needed.
So I am a little confused on why it works without having the xorg driver installed? I have the xorg metapackage installed (I am lazy, and the xorg utilities are useful).
is xf86-video-intel used to enable DRI3? Is DRI2 possible without said driver?
The wiki is really not clear about this, and I know a lot of people probably wonder why it matters if 3D acceleration is already enabled, but I would like to know what is going on :)
Also, saying "Just use wayland" is not a valid answer, already had this happen before so just putting it out there.
I would appreciate a detailed explanation on what is going on to clear the confusion.
Now back to point 2, this was not enabled, VAAPI is the Intel API for hardware video acceleration and after installing the required driver (intel-media-driver) vainfo (from libva-utils) successfully shows support for Hardware video acceleration.
If anyone else has any suggestions or experience with optimising alder lake mobile chips on Arch Linux, I would also appreciate the pointers.
As a small note, I used AMD (ryzen 5 5500U) with my old laptop, I can not remember if I could be bothered to setup hardware video acceleration or going through optimising the integrated graphics, I ran that Arch Install for 2 years and typical me doesn't document any of my configuration or dotfiles, so I am trying to piece distant memories back together, lucky the ArchWiki is a good refresher :P
Thank you for your time, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Website: https://polarian.dev JID/XMPP: polarian@polarian.dev