Hello, I installed the fglrx drivers for my integrated radeon 200 xpress with 256 memory. I tested the same games that I used in windows, I played call of duty and doom3. They run fine in windows but I can barely get it running in linux, I mean like 10-15 fps. I have direct rendering in glxinfo and fglrxinfo showed my video card name. On my monitor settings in sax2, 3d acceleration is checked. Is it normal for games to be slower than windows?
Is there a fix for this? Please help.

-bhert

No, instead they should run at least as fast as on Windows (I have managed to get two games run actually faster for some reason, or at least it felt like so).

So, just a double check:
shows 'direct rendering: yes', and (fglrxinfo) the rederer is not Mesa OpenGL but some name that refers to ATI?

Do you use Compiz or something like that? Have you tried, as a test, to use a lower resolution (say 1024x768, that's a good try), does it make any kind of difference? How about the fps of glxgears?

Then as a last thing I have to say (read a post yesterday) that some ATI drivers, with some cards, produce low fps, next version might give 7 times faster for example, then next version might again give low fps..I take it granted that your card is, read from ATI's docs, supported by the driver version you are using, right?

I would try also Mesa OpenGL and see how big the difference is compared to that (use driver 'radeon' instead of 'fglrx', for example); it should be visible. And if you used SuSE-provided fglrx drivers, I'd try ATI's or vice versa; sometimes it can make a difference (usually distribution-provided driver package of fglrx is better).

glxinfo does show direct rendering:yes

I added compiz, xgl and it messed up the rendering and took even a bigger performance hit

lower resolutions didn't make it better really, barely made any differnce

Here are the fps of glxgears:
6493 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1298.415 FPS
6792 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1358.354 FPS
6829 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1365.659 FPS
6814 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1362.788 FPS

The fglrxinfo:
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON XPRESS Series Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6234 (8.32.5)

As you can see, I have the latest drivers from ATI

In xorg.conf I changed the line from flgrx to radeon. opengl failed to start a game

I made a distro specific package: fglrx_7_1_0_SUSE102-8.32.5-1.i386.rpm

I got the instructions from this site: http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Driver

any more ideas?

-bhert

Nothing seems wrong dude! You got DRI enabled and you have decent framerates in glxgears.

Mind you, on my desktop machine I had a similar problem (though not quite). If your mobo happens to use an nForce3 chipset and you video card is an agp card, there migh be an hardware incompatibility issue. This is what happend on my box.
On the first boot, the linux kernel doesn't get the agp aperture right, causing the agp subsystem to fail. But re-booting the system, everything works.

Try the following; boot into linux (do a "cold boot" that is, boot with computer being shut down for a couple of minutes). Post the result of
here. If you get something about the agp aperture being to small, reboot and try the same command again. If you get the same thing, boot into windows (yes, thats right ) and then straight back into linux and try it over. If you don't get the previous result anymore, you should have 3d acceleration.

schatoor, my card is an integrated pci card, not agp. I don't know about the motherboard. I guess I can't solve the problem like you stated.

-bhert

First, I think most if not all ATI cards perform better in Windows than in Linux because of the difference in drivers. The fglrx drivers are ok but not as good as they should be.

What is your graphic environment like while trying the games? Are you using a resource intensive desktop like KDE with lots of eye candy?

Have you tried running the game in a window instead of full screen? My Doom3 runs well in a 640x480 window with a 64MB GeForce2 MX400. I have a laptop with an integrated ATI IGP 320M using the Xorg radeon driver because fglrx doesn't support it. It can't run a full screen 3d app (or even a screensaver) without causing the system to lockup.

ATI + 3d + Linux
Don't get along very well

This fps are actually pretty good for an ATI card in linux. My old Radeon 9600 gets about 600fps in glxgears

Also to point out "glxgears" is by no means a benchmark...that command is basically running with no load on the card ...which really means nothing. It just basically a rather unaccurate reference.

So far it seems that Nvidia's linux drivers for their cards work really well. Hopefully ATI/AMD will get better drivers soon to come

Hmmm, well, I am using KDE but no eye candy, No screensaver, no superkarambs or any other memory consuming crap. in windows call of duty, I can play at 1024x768, might stutter a little in certain places, no biggie. In linux, I have call of duty at the lowest resolution allowed and it still skips.. In windows doom3, I can play at 800x600 with everything on high and encounter some slowdowns in heavy fights. doom 3 in linux, almost like a slideshow at the lowest resolution

seems like my video card memory is not working at it's fullest. I mean my card is 256 memory. seems like the games are only using 64mb memory while playing. Is it possible that fglrx is not allowing full power of my video card? If that is not the case, I guess I will have to wait until ATI releases newer version of the drivers, hopefully the game will be faster then. Please send in your thoughts. Thanks

-bhert

In Windows, there are two different 3D renders. One is DirectX, majority of the games uses this, and OpenGL, few games uses this by default. Games like Halflife, Doom, War Craft 3, and others have to be force to use this. OpenGL is more dependent on video memory bandwidth and raw GPU/VPU speed. On-board graphics like from ATI and Intel performs very bad because video memory is part of the system memory, so the two have to fight for the bandwidth. nVidia is a little better for on-board graphics, but it is still have to fight for the bandwidth. The software support of nVidia in any OS is better than Intel and ATI.

Using on-board graphics in Linux is different when they allocate memory from system memory. You will have to specify the video RAM size. If you check the logs, it may provide you with little video memory even though you state the size in the BIOS. I recommend upgrading to 2 GB of memory and assigning video RAM size in xorg.conf. Overclocking the memory will help improve the performance, but you will have a lot of crashes from heat and corrupted data. I recommend using processors with 1 MB or more for cache. This cut down on the amount of bandwidth fighting.

On-board graphics are not designed for playing games. I recommend adding an AGP or PCIe graphics card for the best performance. If you can not, you will have to live with very, very low frame rates.