Radeon HD 7540D hardware gives sluggish X performance using radeon driver

bogzab · 12-01-2014, 09:23 AM

Slackware 14.1. X version, radeon driver etc all as supplied.

I recently replaced my motherboard and now have a new all-AMD setup (A6-5400 CPU) and lspci reports that the VGA-compatible controller is the HD 7540D.

The radeon driver gives a perfectly good looking X display (KDE) but is sluggish if you try and fancy animations (some don't work at all) and even glxgears runs with tears in the frames and at a low frame rate:

Code:

glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
281 frames in 5.0 seconds = 56.026 FPS
299 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.631 FPS
283 frames in 5.0 seconds = 56.441 FPS

Anybody know what to tweak to improve performance. Looks to me as though acceleration needs to be enabled, but not sure how this should be done.

Thanks

STDOUBT · 12-01-2014, 09:51 AM

Have you tried "radeonhd" in place of "radeon" in your xorg.conf?
Have you tried running without an xorg.conf altogether?
Did you try xorgsetup?

Darth Vader · 12-01-2014, 10:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bogzab

Slackware 14.1. X version, radeon driver etc all as supplied.

I recently replaced my motherboard and now have a new all-AMD setup (A6-5400 CPU) and lspci reports that the VGA-compatible controller is the HD 7540D.

The radeon driver gives a perfectly good looking X display (KDE) but is sluggish if you try and fancy animations (some don't work at all) and even glxgears runs with tears in the frames and at a low frame rate:

Code:

glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
281 frames in 5.0 seconds = 56.026 FPS
299 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.631 FPS
283 frames in 5.0 seconds = 56.441 FPS

Anybody know what to tweak to improve performance. Looks to me as though acceleration needs to be enabled, but not sure how this should be done.

Thanks

Well, you'll want to look to the DRM and MESA guys to yell for your sluggish display. You should wait for them to tweak the things. Because, the Linux video cards, as usefully drivers, are just like the wine. A relative old one is better.

And you are one of those lucky who can expect future enhancements. Before lamentations, think one second WHAT IF you have a SiS video on-board and no AGP/PCI-E slot for a real video card. And you'll be a very happy... happy owner of a HD 7540D integrated video, running Linux.

bogzab · 12-01-2014, 10:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by STDOUBT

Have you tried "radeonhd" in place of "radeon" in your xorg.conf?
Have you tried running without an xorg.conf altogether?
Did you try xorgsetup?

1. "radeonhd" did not help - X refused to start

2. Have not tried removing the xorg.conf yet

3. xorgsetup helped - it has written me a new xorg.conf file which immediately bumped up graphics performance so that glxgears reports 220 fps and looks like it should do. Also there are a number of commented options in xorg.conf now that I will be able to have a go at adjusting.

Many thanks STDOUBT...

linuxtinker · 12-01-2014, 11:31 AM

take a look at the -current build of slackware it works better with my a6-6400k probably due to the newer kernel and mesa builds

bogzab · 12-01-2014, 03:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by linuxtinker

take a look at the -current build of slackware it works better with my a6-6400k probably due to the newer kernel and mesa builds

Thanks, that's good to know. I might wait until -current becomes 14.2 (various rumours suggest might be soon...). If there is no 14.2 in the new year I will probably try updating this machine to -current.

Nille_kungen · 12-01-2014, 06:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bogzab

Thanks, that's good to know. I might wait until -current becomes 14.2 (various rumours suggest might be soon...). If there is no 14.2 in the new year I will probably try updating this machine to -current.

I second that you should use current.
In current you get a lot of things that's not in 14.1 like DPM (Dynamic Power Management), VDPAU (needs libvdpau and recompilation of mesa but it's worth it) and a lot of other things like OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0
I use an ARUBA GPU myself (8650G) and it works great.

It's the lack of DPM that makes the graphics sluggish but i think that only need an newer kernel and firmware.
The easiest way to install the firmware would be to run the buildscript for it that will grab the latest git and create a package or upgrade to the kernel-firmware package from current.
http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar...rnel-firmware/
If you stay on 14.1 then you want to get DPM working since it makes a big difference in performance and fan control.

ReaperX7 · 12-01-2014, 07:52 PM

You also should look into if you may have missing firmware modules for your Radeon. The HD7x00 series is rather recent in addition, but it should have a halfway decent support basis. You may want to also rebuild LibMesa to use libclc for OpenCL support as well. Using the latest kernel is advised also.