AMD Fusion E350 - A Linux / XBMC Perspective
AMD Fusion series of processors aim to steal the limelight from low end ATOM/ION Combo by providing ample CPU prowess and solid graphics power for HD content rendering. Ever since our review we have been thorougly testing the brazos combo provided by Asus (E35M1-MPro motherboard) in varied conditions and operating systems. Today we will be focusing on the graphics rendering capabilities of the new Fusion APU. The APU that we have tested comes with a dedicaed UDV 3.0 block for rendering 1080p content on the fly saving lots of CPU cycles for other necessary work. Since these APUs are aimed for low end HTPC and multimedia rigs, we will be laying our hand on the ever charming media center XBMC over multiple Oses and check out the performance of the same.
For the test we have used the following components : -
Processors:
AMD E350 APU
Motherboard:
Asus E53M1 M-PRO
Graphics Card
AMD 6310 (E350 IGP)
Memory:
2x2048Mb 1600 MHz Cas9 Corsair XMS3 @ 1066Mhz CL7
Power Supply:
Corsair VX450
Monitor:
Samsung S2233SW 1080p
Operating System:
Windows 7 64bit
Ubuntu 11.04 64bit
Mandriva 2011.0 64bit
Software Benchmark:
XBMC build for Windows.
XBMC build for Linux.
Mplayer
Mplayer with VAAPI
Open ELEC
To get started we will be stressing the UDV block and the APU itself with array of media content. The following movies/videos are used for the test
1. Ice Age3 - 32mbps Bitrate / m2ts format
2. Unknown - 18Mbps Bitrate / mkw format
3. Gladiator - 25Mbps / mkv Format
4. The Dark Knight - 720p - mkv
5. Ratatouille - 1080p / mkv
Windows / XBMC Showdown : - To begin our test we ran the XBMC stable build in the Windows OS with Catalyst 11.8 installed. Before throwing in the 1080 clips we have to enable hardware accelaration from Settings. Once its done its just a matter of time. windows + XBmc performance was spot on, there were no lags even if we used bulky themes such as Black Row and Aeon. no mater what content everything played fine.
Linux : - Getting a Fusion APU working in Linux is not a big deal. However if you have an older distro with dated Xorg and Mesa installed then working of fusion APU might be cumbersome. So its is advisable to run the latest distro. Even though Fusion APU are around for quite a long time, official Linux support comes with linux kernel 3.0 which is not available in any of the stable distro as of now. So if you want a top knotch working of APus without using the proprietary drivers (catalyst / fglrx) then resolve to the latest branch of MESA and kernel.
Anyway moving forward we installed the fglrx 11.8 drivers, and to our surprise there was a singnificant performance improvemnet all over. Be it the genral desktop use/ composite efect or rendering videos. General video rendering works fine with Fusion APU, however things gets nasty when you hook up the system with HD contents. Fusion APU will be able rendering 720p clips with high system usage, however rendering 1080p out of the box even with latest catalyst doesn't work. The only one to blame for is AMD, the homegrown API (VAAPI) for offloading rendering to UDV is still not used by many media players such as graphical frontend of Mplayers and VLC due to sluggsih development.
Inorder to get things working, a linux user has to install certain packages.
- xvba-videor or fglrx vaapi backend
- mplayer-vaapi
Code:
mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi <filename>.mkv/m2ts
| 
1080p | 720p playback using Mplayer VAAPi
Even though VAAPI is good for rendering and infact CPU utilization while rendering a movie was lower than that of windows, vaapi/mplayer failed to run streams with certain codecs. Provided the system was installed with all the necessary codecs.
Using XBMC current build serves no good either. Even though it lists support for VAAPI based accelaration plaback for HD clips is a no go.
OPEN ELEC : Open ELEC is a community which offers custom build for specific hardwares and use XBMC as the main software. I tried the Open ELEC AMD Fusion daily build and was surprised to see the performance. The same XBMC was unable to render movies while Open Elec did with charm. However since I was tesing the daily build there was no sound in the system. The distro failed to configure my sound card for porper working. The team will soon release a stable build for Fusion based APU.
Open Elec : A linux + XBMC OS
Conclusion
AMD Brazos performance for decoding videos on the fly is very good. However the lack of Opensource implementation for now on is a setback. Even though the command line varient works well, it fails to playback handful of content with certain codecs. This lack of support is a led down considering AMD approach towards linux has changed. Plethora of work needs to be done inorder to get things fixed in linux. For now on OpenElec will do the job for those people who are looking for a low calorie distro with all the bells and whistles for anything else Windows drivers and APU performance is spot on.
Special thanks to Asus for providing the samples for review.
Reference : 1. http://www.techenclave.com/reviews-and-previews/review-asus-e35m1-m-pro-amd-198685.html
2. OpenELEC - The living room PC for everyone
3. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI_Catalyst#Video_acceleration
