I’m and extremely unhappy owner of Radeon HD4650 (on AGP) and because of it, an unhappy user of KDE 4.5.
I have installed 2.6.37 kernel from kernel:head (the one patched with famous 200-line patch) to increase my system’s performance, installed Catalyst drivers using a guide, then prepared a xorg.conf, enabled Direct2D (aticonfig --set-pcs-str=DDX,Direct2DAccel,TRUE), and tried lots of combinations in KWin compositing settings.
And even though I tried a lot and lost so much time, I can’t get it to work properly. 2D performance makes me crazy and I’m pulling off my hair. The only thing that is smooth is Compiz. KWin with or without desktop effects is usuable, but not smooth.
And 2D things like scrolling in Konsole, Web browsing etc. take ages.
And the best one! MPlayer over VA-API (upstream libva and xvba-video from SDS) is much slower than XVideo!
Can you help me somehow? It just can’t be that it’s that slow. This is an ironic comedy…
* fglrx - this is the proprietary free (as in free beer) ATI driver for the latest ATI hardware. For that hardware it should have better performance than all other graphic drivers, but it tends to be a fragile driver and many times a kernel or an xorg update will break it. In order to install it one must download it from the ATI web site (or from a special repository) and then do various hand tweaks to get it to work. It does NOT come with openSUSE. One can read about how to install this proprietary high performance graphic driver on the following link: [ATI proprietary driver for openSUSE](http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_drivers)
Indeed many posts can be found in the openSUSE forums on this theme,
e.g. Catalyst and 2.6.34
I don’t think any of the Catalyst drivers work with a 2.6.33 or newer kernel.
But, there in lies the problem if you go off the beaten path so to
speak (as anything not in oss, non-oss and updates), which includes the
ATI, Nvidia proprietary drivers (which taint the kernel), how is it the
release maintainers fault?
However, despite the possibility that it might explain your problem, let us assume that kernel 2.6.37 is not the problem. Assuming that is the case, you MAY find the solution at this Ubuntu hyperlink because the circumstances and symptoms described sound remarkably similar to yours: How To: Configure ATI Radeon HD 4650
It is fairly obvious that you can ignore everything down to
aticonfig --initial
and this bit which restarts Ubuntu’s gnome display manager (so start or restart the X server in place of it).
sudo start gdm
Notes
I prefer (and recommend) the more user-friendly mc (Midnight Commander file manager/file editor) instead of the alien vi.
Option “DRI” “true” apparently switches on 3d acceleration.
I’ve just come up with something strange. GNOME + Compiz provides smooth 2D experience. Maybe not smooth scrolling in a web browser, but I didn’t get used to see it smooth anywhere on Linux. But stable and without seeing each frame of redrawing.
KDE + KWin is extremely slow and barely usable when compared to GNOME + Compiz, so the problem might still not be inside the driver, but the way KDE works.
In the past there’d been some problems with maximizing and resizing. Well, these seem to be gone, but why is all so slow when it’s not drivers fault (X.Org doesn’t use 90% of CPU).
I tried removing all the options from xorg.conf and /etc/amdpcsdb but it wasn’t a solution for me. And the ATI overlays - I do not have to care about them unless I’m going to use XVideo (I won’t: I’ve got VA-API).
So, since I resolved part of it, can you tell me more? I’ve done a big research but didn’t find out a lot about KDE cooperation with fglrx driver. Everything should have been gone with 4.5 release (KWin compositing compatibility tests fixes etc.).
PS I didn’t have problems compiling or installing the driver, but thank you anyway.
Perhaps I did not make myself clear enough. In my earlier post, I had hoped that the wording of the section
It is fairly obvious that you can ignore everything down to
aticonfig --initial
would indicate that you should skip the compilation and installation section. This is for two reasons: (a) because you had already completed that step and (b) the method described in that section of the Ubuntu post is Ubuntu specific.
Response B
Unfortunately editing xorg.conf can be a waste of time unless you ensure that the fglrx driver is actually using the xorg.conf file. If you don’t take this precaution then fglrx may refer to its own database instead. You can ensure that fglrx uses xorg.conf via
(extract)
However, any other applications that normally suffer under lack of acceleration (not just desktop performance, such as kwin, but Flash even more than KDE) now no longer suffer.
DRI is enabled as the Xorg.0.log says. I won’t disable Composite as it’s not part of my objective.
I just noticed the GTK apps works well and Qt don’t (on both KDE and GNOME). It may be related to its 4.6 release, which brought the XSync support, which apparently may not really accelerate anything, but slow down…
But I can’t find a way to turn it off, so… I’m stuck on GNOME.
I’ve just done another great discovery. I had installed kcm-qt-graphicssystem and discovered, that changing default X11/XRender Qt backend to Raster backend for whole KDE has made it a lot snappier and quicker. Even the desktop effects like KMenu slide-in animation is smooth now.
It mean XRender acceleration in fglrx just fails, which is strange. openSUSE 11.3 by default features 2.6.34 kernel, Ubuntu 10.10 2.6.35 and Mandriva 2010.2 2.6.33 and on SUSE form the start I didn’t get smooth KDE, so I have upgraded my kernel to 2.6.37, patched with famous 200-lines-long patch without luck until yesterday.
I couldn’t find a XRender backend so I can’t tell you, how slow does it work for me…