Okay, been trying out Splashy/UPower according to this thread at Ubuntu Forums, and it's been working fine up until now. Recently, I decided to recompile my DRI drivers for my Mobility Radeon 7500. THe drivers and modules installed properly, however when I rebooted, I found that my 3D performance had actually decreased (>200 fps in glxgears) ! I found it would go back to normal when I would remove "vga=" (kicks up the resolution of text mode, which is needed for UPower to work) from the Grub options.

So, does anyone else have this problem? Is there a way I can fix this so I can add "vga=" to my boot options and still get decent 3D performance? Or am I screwed?

AFAIK, the vga option is used to control the resolution of the vesa framebuffer device. Maybe it causes to switch the system in vesafb mode instead of using the ATI driver. However, I believed that the console framebuffer and the X driver are independent. I am using vesafb for console and i810 on the X server.

My suggestion would be to use video=radeon:xres,yres,colordepth
I don't know the syntax for the radeon driver, but maybe you find more info here:
http://thesapphirecat.iwarp.com/pres.../radeonfb.html

Hope it helps!

Well, afaik, they are supposed to be, but the experience of many ATI users (especially those using the fglrx drivers) suggests that they are not. Or that one of the many many issues with the fglrx drivers is some kind of incompatibility with "foreign" framebuffer drivers (like vesafb, as opposed to the radeon fb driver, which I have not yet tried in conjucntion with the fglrx drivers).

But of course, glxgears is NOT a benchmark, so a decrease in the number it displays is relatively meaningless. Real-world performance is what actually matters. If your 3D applications lose a few FPS, well, I hate to say, but just get over it. The drivers suck, after all (and I use them, so I know). If your 3D apps become unusably slow, where before they weren't, then that's a horse of a different color. But on the other hand, we've got a driver release coming in approximately two weeks (last ATI drivers were released mid-June, and they have a two-month release schedule, which they're trying real hard to stick to), so maybe you can try to hang on until then (switch drivers if you must, or give up the framebuffer, or whatever it takes).

As to whether anyone else has this problem, you might want to search/post on the Rage3D Linux drivers forum (Rage3D is a huge semi-official site for ATI users). I don't really follow the progress of the drivers with respect to the Mobility chips (i've got enough problems with my 9800SE to worry about anybody else ), so I don't know off the top of my head how they fare in that respect.

Hope this helps.