Really I have a few questions here for the community I was hoping I could get sorted out.
I have really terrible performance on Radeon 6800 with both the OSS drivers and FGLRX. It’s to the point where I can’t play Heroes of Might and Magic III without frameskipping and lag all over the place (whereas in Windows I could play anything really). I have searched the forums without much luck.
I am unable to use the FGLRX drivers for openSUSE 13.1 since whenever I install them I am unable to resume from suspend or hibernate. When I come back from a suspend or hibernate after installing the proprietary drivers, the machine turns back on but the monitor goes to sleep mode and the keyboard/mouse are totally unresponsive.
Does anyone have any recommendations for benchmarking software so I can see, objectively, that my Radeon card is performing worse than the Voodoo card I had when I was 13?
Any help on any of those items would be greatly appreciated. If you need logs or more information let me know what details you’d like. Really at this point the terrible video card performance is the only things keeping me from being on openSUSE alone. I’d love to give the boot to my Windows partition.
PS I also have an Intel2500k, so it could be possible that somehow the integrated graphics on that chip are causing issues as well.
Going by all of what you wrote, I’d bet large money that its not a case that the iGPU is causing the issues. Rather, I’d wager that the iGPU is the issue! … i.e. you’re unknowingly using the Intel graphics, not the radeon
Post your Xorg log to susepaste and provide us a link
Yep, and it looks like I was wrong on my assumptions … and am now very broke as I had bet fat ducts on them rotfl!
Anyway, no mention of the intel device there at all (I was thinking that this may have been a laptop but now I’m guessing that its actually a desktop system and that you have the iGPU disabled via bios/uefi setting … For academic purposes, you can see if the intel is even being detected via
/sbin/lspci -nnk| egrep 'VGA|3D|Display' -A2
)
I skimmed through the log and on casual glance it looks in order, so lets now turn to the next logical area: the 3d/opengl performance
Next thought is that it might be related to power mgmt and the default clocks being low on the card. Don’t recall when the new PM stuff was implemented off hand, but it may have been post your 3.11 kernel. One thing you could try, if feasible (particularly if you can make a backup of your current install if you wish to revert), is to either install a new kernel and graphics stack (don’t have links to the particular repos offhand at the moment) … or test out the 13.2 release
I also seem to recall that one of the higher end 6xxx cards did indeed have **** performance for some reason or other … try checking into the phoronix forums for complaints about your card (which lspci indicates is actually a 6950).
Thanks Tyler. I’m going to make a system backup when I get home from school today and give that a whirl. I’ll report back my findings. Two quick questions:
Do you have any suggestions for a way of benchmarking before and after the upgrade?
What will happen to packages I have installed which do not have a 13.1 version available yet?
So, I’ve installed openSUSE 13.2 and already I’m noticing a huge performance gain. The plasma desktop is way more responsive and things just seem “smoother”. I really should have produced a benchmark beforehand so I could have an objective comparison. Once I get the system configured I’d load a game I tried to play on 13.1 and report back my findings. (Still looking for a suggestion for benchmarking).
Greg
PS I’ll also try the proprietary drivers and let you know if the sleep/hibernate functionality is now working with those drivers.
I don’t have any particular benchmarking software to recommend. I believe that a number of games come with their own. Phoronix use a bunch of basic benchmarks that you can get an idea from. Other then that, as I don’t play games, I have no further suggestions in this regard.
I suspect it was just related to a low set default clock for your adapter. I checked and saw that the new PM code was available in 3.11, but was not enabled by default. When the new PM code is utilized, the clocks on the adapter can change from their low defaults. Hence much better performance being attainable. If you wanted to test between the two distros (though, if you’ve got satisfying results now, I really wouldn’t even bother as its just academic at this point), you could test this theory out in your 13.1 install by enabling the PM. Though I seem to also recall it may have been a bit flaky for some high end 6xxx devices until kernels 3.12 or .13.
I don’t quite follow your other question. I’m sure others can provide help and suggestions too.
… i.e. you’re unknowingly using the Intel graphics, not the radeon