pipes screensaver problem
 

Hello all,

Having trouble here with the performance of the "pipes" screensaver that comes with xscreensaver.

The problem is that horizontal lines extend from the left side of the screen as the pipes are being drawn. The lines do not dissappear and eventually fill up the left two thirds of the screen.

The lines as they are drawn, appear in the same colour as the current pipe being drawn.


I am using an ATI Rage 128 PCI video card.

The problem appears if Xwindows is using the ATI driver device in the xorg.conf file.

If I change the device to "vesa", the problem dissappears and pipes screensaver works nicely.


GoogleEarth also has a caniption when using the ATI driver, but if I use the "vesa" driver, Google Earth is usable, albeit rather slooooooow.


I was wondering if someone else had similar experience and managed to determine what needs to be done with the ATI driver/options to make things work nice.

Regards,
Greenie

Using the "vesa" driver has its drawbacks. I noticed that all of the MPG, WMV, ASF files that people have emailed me tend to playback slowly and jump and skip frames.


I have discovered that if I use the "r128" driver, I can use several options for the "r128" driver which can resolve certain issues.

Below is what I have for the "Device" section of my xorg.conf file.


Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Rage 128 PF/PRO AGP 4x TMDS"
Driver "r128"
Option "SWcursor" "off"
Option "NoAccel" "on"
Option "Dac6Bit" "off"
Option "Display" "CRT"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection


I have found that if I set "SWcursor" to "off" : this fixes a bug with the mouse cursor turning black under certain conditions.

If "SWcursor" is "on", the mouse cursor will sometimes turn black. Of course, with a dark background, the mouse cursor gets lost until it hovers over a ight area of the screen.


I have found that if "NoAccel" is "on" then the pipes screensaver works fine, as does Google Earth albeit slow in software OpenGL mode.

The draw back is that the entire xwindow experience is slow, windows drag slowly, resizing a window is slow etc. small MPG, WMV, ASF files seem to playback OK though.


If "NoAccel" is set to "off", this will return the system to using hardware acceleration and the xwindow experience again improves. The drawback here is that the pipes screensaver goes glitchy again and GoogleEarth just crashes!

In addition to the above. If I reduce the colour sdepth to 16 in the xorg.conf file, then dvd playback also works well in xine using the "XV" video mode (which is the best mode to use for dvd playback in xine).

DVD playback with the "XV" video mode in Xine does not work when the default colour depth is set to 24 in the xorg.conf

A really odd thing.

If I set the default depth to 24 in xorg.conf and then remark out the lines of the subsection for the 24 depth, everything works perfect for the user. The pipes screensaver works well, DVD playback works well and google earth works OK.

However, the GDM greeter always displays in an incorrect resolution. That is, the GDM greeter seems to adopt some wide screen mode resolution.


I'm assuming that with the 24 depth subsection remarked out, GDM and Xwindows makes some assumptions, but still runs in 24 depth.

But why does everything work well if I remark out the 24 depth subsection whilst setting the default depth to 24

And why doesnt things work well when using a default depth of 16?

If I set the default depth to "!5" in xorg, then everything works OK aswell, the drawback of course is that everything looks "grainy" as the colour pallette is no longer large enough.

grrrrrrr