Inspired by http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...00g_slow&num=1 I was interested to see what performance I could get running Minecraft on my IBM T43 (ATI X300 graphics) using Gallium3D rather than the older mesa driver that comes with Debian Squeeze. With Debian Lenny I'd been using the proprietary fglrx driver which had superior 3D acceleration. With Debian Squeeze, which has the open-source radeon driver, with the ATI driver no longer supporting the old graphics card in this machine, fps dropped from usually above 30 fps to under 10 fps.

As a quick way of trying this out, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a spare hard drive. However, I still get abysmal fps, so I'm not sure the driver has been set up correctly.

However, 'glxinfo | grep rand' returns:

so I guess I am running Gallium3D after all. I'll be doing some more investigations, but perhaps someone has some thoughts on this off the top of their head. I don't know if Gallium 0.4 is a relatively recent version, how well the X300 / RV370 card is supported under Gallium etc etc.

Minecraft doesn't have much in the way of textures, but it does have tons and tons of geometry...
Have you tried enabling HyperZ? I'm not sure if HyperZ is working on Minecraft or not, but if it is, that would give you a big boost in performance in a game like Minecraft.

Without HyperZ, the graphics card will be drawing geometry that isn't visible, which of course, is slower. The proprietary binary blob (fglrx) driver by ATI/AMD of course, uses HyperZ by default. I don't believe HyperZ is yet enabled for default for most ATI/AMD graphics cards using the open source driver at this time.

You can google on how to enable Hyper-Z, I think it's just an environment setting. Just beware that it might break a few games or cause hard lockups as Hyper-Z is still a bit buggy in the open source drivers. Some people run Hyper-Z all the time and don't have any problems at all, but some people have problems with it all the time.. It's a "try it and see" kind of thing.

I have Hyper-Z enabled on my RV410 (Gallium 0.4) hardware and haven't yet found any problems that I can attribute directly to Hyper-Z.


Cheers, and happy gaming.