ATI & Radeon 9600 RV350

[Claude Jones]

On Wed April 4 2007, John Horne wrote:
> So long as glxinfo says you are using direct rendering, then you are
> okay.
>

Yes, it does say that

> No, you are getting better performance than I am :-) I get 9,000 frames
> per 5 seconds, whereas you get 26,000. I'm not sure why, but would not
> be surprised if the cards are slightly different - a '9600' against a
> '9600 Pro' perhaps.
>

I caught that discrepancy on a re-read after my post came back from the list. 
My card is housed in an HP Pavilion laptop model ZX5000 - fairly high end for 
its time

>
> > As you can see, you're running composite enable and mine is disabled
>
> Yes, I seem to remember that I had to enable 'composite' to get beryl to
> work.
>

Disabling composite was a 'fix' suggested by many sites for getting the ATI 
driver going, which is why I set that - still haven't tried enabling it, yet

> However, I see that you are still using the fglrx driver. It is
> difficult for me to do a direct comparison because I would have to
> re-install the ati driver stuff, the start up script, the
> 'enable-fglrx-display' command or whatever it was! :-) I found it much
> easier to just use the radeon driver. Having said that though, I do not
> use 3D for much at all, so it may be that you do get better performance
> with fglrx rather than radeon. I have an opengl 3d screen-saver, a 3D
> game and, as mentioned, have used beryl - although I tend not to use it
> now, a bit too much eye-candy! The point is that they all work fine
> though.
>

Personally, I don't care for Beryl - don't use it after giving it a try. I'm 
in television production, and I use this box as an experimental platform for 
trying the various LInux programs for content creation - so, that's my 
interest

> Final point is that you may want to look through the 'radeon' man page.
> There are several options in there that relate to performance. I have
> tried some, but can't say I have noticed any great improvement. The
> 'AGPFastWrite' tends to hang my system, so I don't use that one :-)
> The GARTSize option can improve performance but doesn't seem to be
> mentioned in the man page. It defaults to 8Mb, but can be increased to
> 64.

Having realized that I'm getting much better performance than I thought, I'll 
probably just stick with fglrx for now, but I'll track the progress of the 
radeon driver project, and give it another shot down the road

Thanks again for your input...

-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA