ATI radeon 4870x2
 

After (finally) getting the 4870x2 to run correctly under debian (lenny), the only issue I'm still having is low frame rates.

I am currently using the latest drivers from ATI's website (the drivers installed by apt (proprietary or otherwise)) did not work for me at all as far as 3d acceleration goes.

The game I have been testing with is World of Warcraft run using wine. (I have used both opengl and directx, both give the same results.)

Running the exact same setup in windows usually averages me ~150fps or so, while I achieve a maximum of about 50 under linux (which doesn't sound so bad, but the mouse feels sluggish and everything just doesn't seem as snappy as it should.)

Now, I'm wondering if there is anything I have left out as far as the setup of the card goes. All I have done is install the drivers from ATI's website, which, looking at the xorg.conf file, has set everything up properly for their use.

I'm just wondering if there is something I'm missing that's slowing the card down, or is it just the fact that ATI's linux drivers are subpar? If that is the case I suppose I will have to get rid of it and grab an nvidia card ...

Any help or input is greatly appreciated :)

There's nothing wrong with your card. Its just that the WINE emulation is rather slow in my experience. There's sadly no real Linux gaming benchmarks to compare it to.

Try using a professional emulator like Cedega or CrossOver. You might have some better luck with that.

Chris

I did some reading around on Cedega and CrossOver, and from what I'm seeing World of Warcraft tends to run better on Wine, with a few cases where they are reported to run the same. From that, I'd rather not spend the money to find out for myself.

Thanks for the tip though :)

No problem. I've had a hit and miss relationship with WINE. I used CrossOver Office for quite a while and had a bit better luck with that. My only real use for it was running FireFox and Shockwave. (Didn't handle that well).

If you're wanting to have a bit better luck with WINE, I'd recommend getting all the DLLs from your C:\WINDOWS\system32\ directory and saving them in the WINE system32 directory. That can solve a lot of problems, and may even speed your game up.

Hope that also helps!

Well I found a free trial for CrossOver, and there is absolutely no difference between the two (CrossOver and Wine) as far as I can tell in performance.

I'll try bringing over the whole system32 directory, I brought over a file from there to get Ventrilo to work, so maybe that will do the trick, thanks :)

If that doesn't work, I think I'll just ditch the ATI card and pick up an nvidia sometime. Hopefully I'll have better luck with that.