I’m currently using suse 11 with kde 4.1 with fglrx drivers on my ATI 9800pro. It’s not nearly as fast as when i used ubuntu in gnome, and the difference is exaggerated when compositing is turned on (ie compiz fusion in ubu was much faster than the desktop effects in kde 4.1). I don’t care too much for compositing, knowing the limits of this card, but video is choppy in vlc, and unwatchable in dragonplayer/kaffeine or anything using xine.
I’m wondering if it’s ATI’s drivers that are doing this (I’m using the most recent version). Would switching to the standard radeon drivers help, and how would I go about doing this? I’ve read that ATI’s drivers only help if it’s a recent card and to use the radeon driver for older cards (like mine). How true is this?
AFAIK, the open source drivers will always be slower than the ones made by ATI. The best reason to use the open source ones is for stability.
I would be willing to bet that if you uninstalled the ATI driver and went back to the radeon one, you could still get some limited 3d acceleration in Sax2. I have an X800 Pro that I got 3d support using the radeon driver.
Yea, that sounds right. Xine, however, is quite a pain. It jumps around when playing video making it impossible to watch. Any ideas?
Xine jumps around using the ATI proprietary driver? If so, I would definitely go back to the radeon driver.
What would be the best way to switch drivers? I know I can edit xorg, but is there an easier way?
radeonhd driver is still under construction. very slow on HD 2400 pro agp. Developers promise to finish driver soon=)
Stick with the ATi drivers for now.
Performance Issues - cchtml.com
As above, try adding this option,
Option “XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”
to your xorg.conf and report back.
I like the performance of the ATI drivers, but they always seem to have some fatal flaw.
For example, I installed the 8.8 driver over the weekend, and had great 3d support, the CCC worked, fgl_glxgears ran beautifully, and everything seemed fine.
But then I started getting frozen screens every few hours. The whole system would lock up and I would have to hold down the power button on my notebook and do a cold restart.
Not worth dealing with, IMHO, so I got rid of them after about a day and a half.
And the version before that would lock up my system every time the screen saver came on, also requiring a cold reboot.
I would rather have the stability, and not stress out my hardware by doing cold reboots daily, but that’s just me.