Good afternoon everyone!

I solved an old machine using Slack 14.2 32bit.

Config: Athlon xp 3200 - VGA X850XT PE from ATI.

I wonder if some way to install the card's proprietary driver and or will I have to get the same horrible performance ??

That range of cards is manufactured in 110nm scale (= huge = slow) and even older than my X1250 = RS690M, (vintage 2007) which I consider to be pretty crap also. x800 was first released in 2004. It clocks around 400 Mhz.

There is no way you want the proprietary driver, and ATI doesn't want to remember they made the x800, or anything half that old. You need
* The OSS (kernel) driver which does get commits from ATI. Even there, our video cards are viewed as old crap that some dweebs insist on holding on to.
* Recent versions of xorg-server, libpixman, Mesa, libdrm & radeon drivers; all of that is probably supplied or available for Slack 14.2
* You may benefit marginally from installing LLVM, which is a quick compiler and makes up in my case for a basically non existent 'vertex shader' (whatever that is).

A few years ago, I went the LLVM route. I had to compile LLVM, & recompile the radeon drivers & mesa --with-llvm. I didn't note any magical improvement but I was assured by developers it would get more out of the card. The OSS driver caters for more modern cards (Not needing LLVM) in the main, so it's hard to guess if llvm support is built in. Perhaps some Slackware guru will comment on this point.

Another approach is to decide if it's antique, or obsolete. Obsolete means it's valueless and in need of replacement; Antique values it for what it is, regardless of the fact that modern stuff works better.

Be more specific. Where do you get horrible performance?
No.

* The OSS (kernel) driver which does get commits from ATI. Even there, our video cards are viewed as old crap that some dweebs insist on holding on to.
* Recent versions of xorg-server, libpixman, Mesa, libdrm & radeon drivers; all of that is probably supplied or available for Slack 14.2

* You may benefit marginally from installing LLVM, which is a quick compiler and makes up in my case for a basically non existent 'vertex shader' (whatever that is).



Ok business_kid!
I activated the machine just for the same hobby. I learned a lot from her!

It is good to know that a compiler (LLV) is faster and more efficient than the GCC.




seasons, Thank you!
I wonder if some way to install the card's proprietary driver
No


As I like the machine a lot, I'll install the slack 12 that has xorg 7.3 and winxp as well.

I installed yesterday the slack12 that by default and the Xorg7.2, of face I noticed a huge difference in the performace with the x850xt pe.

Otherwise I have not installed the ATI proprietary driver.