OpenGL Performance issue (FCEU)
 

I have a computer for gaming. It was running Windows XP for a short time and now it's on Debian. Im using the NES emulator FCEU, Windows ran it fine but on Debian the video is very choppy. I'm using opengl (without opengl the video sync is poor with fast movement). I'm using the ATI driver on both Debian (fglrx) and Windows.

glxgears gives me:
15968 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3193.595 FPS
... which seems to show good performance.

The only thing I can find that may be wrong is the following:
Paletted texture extension not found. Using slower texture format...

Could that be the cause of the issue and if so, how can this be resolved?

Are you definitely using hardware acceleration? I assume on Linux you are using Mesa? Remember that GLXgears is very basic and doesn't use textures etc so you will get a higher framerate.

How can I check if I am using hardware acceleration? I've just done a default install of Debian and installed and configured fglrx-driver, I'm not sure if Mesa is used. Sorry I'm new to this.

Thanks

Does this answer the question?

glxinfo | grep renderer
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series

Try this:

'glxinfo | grep -i render' will list the renderer string (which you've already shown and which looks good) and whether or not you have direct rendering. Either one, by itself, is not enough to determine if you have 3D acceleration. I do suspect, however, that 3D acceleration is setup properly for you, though.

Adam

Is it to be expected that the ATI drivers perform better in Windows? The performance I get in Linux is comparable to my laptop which has an onboard Intel graphics card; that runs FCEU just as well (choppy).

I have no experience with FCEU, but I can say that with Catalyst 10.3, using the exact same configuration file, I get anywhere from 15 to 20 more frames per second with the doom3 timedemo in Linux than I do in Vista.