I seem to have revived this thread :)

I've not updated my distribution, it's Mandriva 2006 64 bit straight off the CD. No ATI driver because it threw up funny errors about glxr_drv.so not being found despite it being exactly where it was supposed to be. No attempt at updating made either.

glxinfo | grep direct reveals "direct rendering: no".

I don't have system memory shared with the video card. The ATI card has 128Mb onboard memory, there should be zero need to share memory - and at a 50% performance hit!

I think the CPU is recognized correctly, the control centre says AMD 64 3500+ running at 2194 Mhz.

And for what it's worth: display is 1280x800, 24 bit, that worked straight away at least...

Apparantly, the OpenGL renderer string is Mesa GLX indirect.

And at the risk of setting off a 64bit vs 32bit argument, I got only 300fps in 32bit, compared with 700fps in 64bit (plus the DVD playback was funny in 32bit), with the same screen resolution and bitdepth. So, I'm backing the 64bit horse, it's working best, for me anyway.

as stated, it's ATI's driver which requires the use of shared memory, not the opensource one.

It's not that the CPU get recognized which has been the problem in the past. It's that HP/Compaq have the BIOS getting recognized such that the Linux kernel thinks another timer needs to be running. THIS caused the CPU to overwork and resulted in CPU usage showing close to 50% usage even when idle. It also slowed everything down.

The other thing I mentioned was related to Linux kernels around the 2.6.10 version. The problem there was that the kernel module/driver for the ATIIXP chipset used, wasn't being configured to enable IDE DMA. Another big performance killer. Linux Kernels 2.6.11 up seem to have fixed that but you still might check to see if IDE DMA is enabled by default, it's not always enabled.

not surprising since you're not using the ATI driver and therefore not using the ATI OpenGL libs

That's great. When I installed Ubuntu 5.04( kernel v2.6.10-5 ) I installed both the 32bit version and 64bit version along with the ATI 32 and 64 bit driver(2D and 3D) along with 32bit and 64bit version of Suns JAVA and JAVA3D. They both worked fine but at that time, there was hardly a noticeable difference in 3D performance. Since I often use my systems for embedded development and just hacking at things, the problems with getting 32bit apps running on the 64bit platform made the 32bit side far more appealing.

So, if 2D is all you need/want on your laptop with the ATI Express 200M, then it sounds like the opensource ati driver should do that trick. If you have an ATI Express 200M with shared memory, the ATI driver may work fine for you. If you have an ATI Express 200M with 128MB of video-only memory, that ATI driver will likely not work(things could change) and the opensource ati driver is your only hope unless you go back to the 2.6.10 kernel. And Xena, your ~700fps is only down about 40% from what the ATI 200M driver does on my AMD Sempron 3000+ Compaq R4000 running kernel 2.6.10-34-K7 and all the patches applied to fix the 'issues' stated(timer, ATI driver, ATIIXP/DMA ). I still think ATI could do better since they actually did at one time( driver v8.13.4 ).

I did catch what was said earlier about using the ATI driver and not the open source one. But why...? it's 50% slower, so where's the advantage in that?

As for the CPU usage, top shows about 3% usage, seems ok.

Personally I'd love to get the 3D working but it looks like being ludicrously difficult to do so, no biggy, I got another (NVIDIA) laptop, next time I'll just buy a little more carefully.

One question... DMA is for hard drives no? Why would that affect video performance, and how do I enable that to improve the video?

Wait, wait, wait. When people are talking about the kernel driver, that is for the bridge to the video chipset, so that should be CONFIG_AGP_INTEL, not CONFIG_AGP_ATI.

Second, in xorg.conf, the video card driver should be radeon, not r128, since you have a Radeon, not a Rage. And the ati driver there, is just a generic.

The proprietary ATI drivers have far fewer features than the Gatos ones, which are what comes in Xorg 7.0 .

I'm having the same issue with a desktop using the integrated video card on an ECS motherboard. The screen locks immediately after log-in to fc5, so I'm moving to a PCI Express video card to get around the issue. I'm not a big gamer so don't need a memory monster. Any suggestions on an inexpensive Nvidia card?

If your looking for a new notebook, go after the Thinkpad T Series. They use the T2600 processors and have many additional features not available on other notebooks such as the hard drive airbag, roll cage and hardware based security using a chip integrated into the motherboard. Of course I may be a little biased since I worked for IBM ;)

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/thinkpad/tseries/index.html

Jed