Hello I have a Dell 1737 laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650. I have the ATI fglrx drivers installed.
All OK… BUT :(
I have no hardware graphics acceleration to any application.
glxgears consumes 29% of the CPU to run.
desktop compositing consumes 0-50% CPU depending on activity.
Is this normal???
running opensuse 11.2 up to date…
Please, any suggestions, ideas?
Thank you for reading
Seems pretty normal… Do you experience any other type of slowness? Like scrolling webpage etc?
no scrolling is fine…
flash video is also not accelerated…
is there a way to fix this?
thanks
Just to make sure you have acceleration running, post the result of
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep dri
Flash is GPU acceleration, but whether it does a good job at it is another matter. Adobe Flash is closed sourced so there’s no way to fix it other than waiting for Adobe to finally make some decent plugin for Linux.
Flash is one sad fact of Linux, I know. But why only look at Flash? There’re many more great things about Linux and don’t let one small thing negatively affect the whole greatness.
If you have any further questions feel free to post 
What does this mean?
Do you have special desktop effects functioning. ?
What do you mean by flash video not accelerated?
I assume you know that the ATI drivers for Linux do NOT support AVIVO (to offload processing to GPU) as opposed to the ATI drivers for MS-Windows which DO support AVIVO.
ATI for reasons known internal to themselves do NOT provide Linux drivers with the same performance quality as their MS-Windows “equivalent” drivers.
Hello there…
Well I did not know about AVIVO and etc. and I now understand that the ATI drivers are not fully functional…
About 3D apps, well I have desktop compositing enabled
and I am running google earth on a daily basis for my job …
So unfortunately I should get 3D to run on GPU…
Flash video for example from youtube needs above 50% of CPU to run
and always drops frames while on full screen mode…
The output of " cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep dri " is:
(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
X.Org XInput driver : 4.0
(II) "dri" will be loaded. This was enabled by default and also specified in the config file.
(II) "dri2" will be loaded by default.
(II) LoadModule: "dri"
(II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//extensions/libdri.so
(II) Module dri: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
(II) LoadModule: "dri2"
(II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//extensions/libdri2.so
(II) Module dri2: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
(II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//drivers/fglrx_drv.so
(II) AMD Video driver is running on a device belonging to a group targeted for this release
(II) AMD Video driver is signed
(==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so"
(II) fglrx(0): driver needs X.org 1.4.x.y with x.y >= 99.906
(II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit for fglrx driver
(II) fglrx(0): [uki] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0"
(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver.
(II) fglrx(0): Disabling in-server RandR and enabling in-driver RandR 1.2.
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/dri/fglrx_dri.so
ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 4.0
(II) Synaptics touchpad driver version 1.1.3
ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 4.0
Should I try something else? Another driver maybe?
Please, ANY comment-idea-hint is very appreciated.
Thank you for reading
I think you should rebuild your graphic driver from scratch.
Remove the old fglrx and ensure you have kernel-source and kernel-syms associated with your kernel version installed. Also linux-kernel-headers installed. Have the base development pattern from yast software installed. And then rebuild the driver the “hardway” (which is NOT hard) from run level 3, where you enter run level 3 direct from the boot/splash (and NOT via init 3 from runlevel 5). And then after rebuilding the fglrx rpm (via executing the .run file with the appropriate arguments) install the fglrx rpm that was created, … delete any previous /etc/X11/xorg.conf so you are starting from a CLEAN slate, and then build a new xorg.conf with “aticonfig --initial”. Restart the PC and test.
I’m thinking something is not right in your driver as my less capable Radeon HD3450 on a Dell Studio 1537 works great. (and it built it as described above).
Hello oldcpu
I will try this but I would like to check something beforehand.
Could you please check your CPU load when you run glxgears??
I mean CPU should be zero or close to zero for the glxgears process if the ATI card takes the load of rendering right??
Could you please check?
Thank you for your help
Unless you have powerful quad core processor, flash video is definitely going to take cpu. For me here flash will take almost 100% cpu according to top. Full screen will most probably be choppy due to inefficient scaling in flash player.
For performance related to Linux flash you can read
Penguin.SWF
Running glxgears takes 100% cpu for Xorg + kwin + glxgears combined with composite on. With composite off only glxgears is taking ~16%, Xorg and kwin are almost zero.
Ahhhh ok I understand then…
So my system works 100%… its just that AVIVO off-loading is not available in Linux and Flash does not have GPU hardware acceleration…
I must say that running a video in VLC does not load the CPU at all.
Thank you all
for helping
Just a tip: playing .flv video in video player won’t tax the CPU so much as well.
There’s initial support of VA-API in some linux video players already (that offload some decoding task to the GPU) but you need an ATI card that have UVD2. HD 3200 and HD 3450 are only UVD1 capable. Hopefully the support of VA-API is extended to UVD1 as well.
Flash actually does have GPU hardware acceleration, read kaourantin.net: What does GPU acceleration mean?. It is just not in the sense of what people expect when they heard of “GPU acceleration in Flash 10.1 beta in decoding HD h.264 video (Windows only)” . Well, whatever, you get what I mean