2D accelaration with ATI on Slack 12.1
 

In addition to this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ckware-645499/
I would like to ask about 2D which is slow, e.g. listviews, menus and browsing in konq at all are slow. Any ideas bout options in Xorg?

well, nobody is an expert in hd 2400 agp as I see =(

3D drivers and performance in Linux gets most of the attention it seems - which is unfortunate. I can only speak for myself, but most of my work in linux is with 2D, not 3D and I have to agree with you - ATI 2D performance blows.

I had always used nvidia cards and had seen it written that the kernel nv driver gave better 2D performance than the prop. nvidia driver. I don't think I ever saw a difference myself. The nvidia cards worked well regardless.

I'm one of those people that attracts free PCs. Usually "broken" boxes that I manage to fix quite easily. As a result, I'm often stuck with hardware I might not have chosen otherwise, but I keep myself and 2 kids with working computers so I can't complain.

This is how I ended up with a string of ATI boxes. Like you, I could not understand the piss-poor 2D performance in X, but I never found a solution in the configuration options. One example that drove me nuts was the lag when I dragged XMMS around the screen. Another was the repainting of the desktop when a browser was open. Just horrible. I also had issues with transparent terms.

The only box I have now that I actually purchased is a Dell laptop with - yes - an ATI Radeon X1400 card (at the time nvidia was only on the AMD setups :(). 2D performance is, again, not great, but not as bad as past experience with ATI. Perhaps it's the card, or the CPU, or the RAM, or some combination. It still is not as good as I think it should be. My card is finally supported by the open radeon driver, but I did not notice much difference between the 2 in 2D and stuck with fglrx.

I'm running slackware 12.1 on my newest freebee - a HP/Compaq desktop business PC. This thing is as low budget as it gets. Everything is on-board and there is no AGP slot to add a separate card. Even if there was, the cards would be too tall to fit in the case. The video is an Intel 82865G integrated graphics chip running on the i915 driver. Motherboard chipset is ICH5. The intel 2D performance is superior to the ATI 2D performance and the DVD video is also far superior to the results I get when I play a DVD on the Dell. 3D on the intel is not so hot (of course), but I can play Foobiliards and Neverputt just fine. GoogleEarth works great too.

So, that was my verbose way of saying I think ATI blows as a 2D card. ;) Hopefully someone will make a suggestion that helps you more than this. ;)

Hi,

The people at phoronix forums have a lot of info on this kind of issue:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=46

Best regards,

Ben

Yeah, I see just the same stuff on my desktop..

Heh, I've asked already there.. Still no luck yet.
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11333

From what I remember, 2D on recent fglrx drivers with recent ATI cards is slower for 2 reasons:

1) 3D acceleration gets most of the attention from the developers, so the 2D drivers are not optimised properly for recent ATI cards.

2) In recent drivers, some 2D functions are now accelerated through the 3D drivers partly because of the the above problem, even though this is inherently slower. XV is one of them, If I remember correctly

Why your 2D acceleration is particularly slow I have no idea. This seems to be one of those annoying problems that affect only some people and as a result ATI/AMD are unwilling to admit it exists, even if they even knew where to look. There is a similar but more general problem with NVidea's 2d acceleration on recent cards BTW.

EDIT: I seem to remember some people have had sucess solving this problem by explicitly disabling Composite (which is on by default in recent XOrg).

Already tried this

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "off"

2D performance is not that bad for my x1600. Now I have a question though.

What do these settings do?
I can tell you a few things from what i have experienced:

this is wrong for me.
Textured video works better 3D/2D. Which is enabled by default.

Most if not all of your other options are just not needed, the driver will handle them. If I'm wrong please tell me what they do for you.

Option "TexturedVideo" "off"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"

these options make video playback ok, without freezing the system.
I don't understand the purpose of the rest options.. simply added them due numerous howto's which I followed and re-followed thousand times.

If the other options don't actually seem to be doing any good, then I would personally comment them out. Perhaps when you have the time, you can try enabling each individually and see if that makes any difference.