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Just installed slackware-13, and sorting issues. I actually have googleearth running - just. It's telling me it's using opengl, but opengl is absolutely cat on this box I have ATI RS690M with the radeonhd driver on my laptop. Opengl is terribly slow. Videos stall, but I move them with
mplayer -vo sdl <my_video>
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Anything I can do with Google earth? No option to swap. fglrx is crap on opengl.

Mesa had a serious issue with opengl performance on integrated ATI GPUs for much of last summer, and I suspect this issue was present in the Mesa release used in Slackware 13.

Having said that, the first thing I would do is make sure that you have 3D acceleration working. You can check that with the full output of 'LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo'.

Second, I find that disabling "Atmosphere" in GE can make a big difference in performance, so that might be worth trying.

If, however, you do have 3D acceleration working, and atmosphere is disabled, upgrading Mesa might be your next best option.

Adam

Thanks for the atmosphere tip. If Mesa is sorted I'll update it. I stuck on slackware because I found slamd64-12.2 a little short on ancillary stuff and started having these massive battles trying to get in simple programs.:-/. GE barfs the X server in Slamd64, and I don't want to go there.

At this stage, however, slack is the PITA as slamd is well sorted.I probably don't have dri and will come back when I do and post again.

OK.
I now have direct rendering, largely by updating Mesa from slackware current(Mesa-7.7). But firefox crashes two seconds after I log it to gmail :-((

I feel a downgrade coming there.I remember some magic combination of mesa, xf86-video-radeonhd-1.3.0 and kernel 2.6.31 or 32 that was supposed to actually acknowledge my video card. But it would not compile on slamd for me for some reason.

I'd be surprised if your 3D drivers are causing firefox to crash. Also, having direct rendering show up in glxinfo does not necessarily mean you have 3D acceleration. You need to check the Renderer string as well.

Finally, I would not recommend the radeonhd driver. It doesn't get nearly as much development or testing as the radeon driver does.

Adam

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Trust me, the only change was updating Mesa, and I'm dead on gmail. I log in, sit there 2 seconds, and firefox crashes out. I'm getting video madness here: Let me give you an example. This is on slamd-12.2, my backup system. I'm upgrading to slackware 13, and it's just too messy trying to get things into slamd

bash-3.1$ glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
unknown chip id 0x791f, can't guess.
libGL warning: 3D driver returned no fbconfigs.
libGL error: InitDriver failed
libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)

bash-3.1$ lspci -n
00:00.0 0600: 1002:7910

bash-3.1$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 Host Bridge

That's another ball of <expletive deleted> waiting for me to grapple with. If I was making it up I'd have smileys all over it. Video on this box has always been 'jammy side down.' But I have git trees of radeon, radeonhd, and even the appropriate fglrx waiting for install. On your advice, I will try the radeon driver first.

I did yell at amd and was told that there was some combination of kernel 2.6.31, mesa, and radeonhd-1.3.0 that was going to give a major push forward, and was trying to gather that.

Well I can tell you that your using quite an old version of Mesa, because the RS690 chips IDs were added a while ago, though I still don't see how your 3D drivers would impact firefox. And I'd still not recommend using radeonhd, no matter what anyone associated with AMD said. All new development is being done on the radeon driver. And, honestly, if you're going to upgrade your kernel, I see no reason (at least as far as your video drivers are concerned) to stick with 2.6.31.

Adam

That's good advice.

I think you are helping me on another post (Framebuffer issues). The grand plan is kernel 2.6.33.*, a recent Mesa, qt3 & qt4, and try the latest drivers. The radeon driver will certainly be the first to be tried.
My current Mesa on slamd64 is 7.03, and I have 7.7 available as a slackware-current. This thing is fighting me every inch of the way.