3D Performance of ATI Drivers

English Hardware
#1

Hi,

I have set up a high end computer with AMD Phenom II 940 and ASUS ATI HD4870 1 GB Dark Knight. It is running SLED 11, with full patches.

Using the latest ATI’s driver, the 3D performance is really poor.
glxgears is only half of the score on a K8 Opteron with nVidia Quadro FX5600, which has a much older GPU.

Running ANSYS, the simple 3D graphics keeps flashing and refreshing during rotation, pan and zoom.

I have set all the settings in Catalyst Control Centre to “performance”, and the performance is better than before, but still unacceptable.

Is the 3D graphics performance of ATI’s drivers supposed to be that bad? I cannot get any useful reply from the local ATI support people as they are Windows only.

Are there any settings I can change? I have gone through all the ATI documentation and there is nothing of any use.

Is there any one here running professional applications who can share his/her experience?

Using a FireGL card would not help for sure, since the GPUs are very similar, and the GNU/Linux drivers are identical.

Gim Leong

#2

Glxgears is not a good benchmark for your GPU.
You should try something else. On my system (4850) 3D works fine with the latest drivers.I would try to uncheck all override application settings in amdcccle and then restart X.

If that still doesn’t work you could try aticonfig --help and test some of those options.