glxgears
1509 frames in 5.002 seconds = 301.679 FPS
1547 frames in 5.002 seconds = 309.276 FPS
1576 frames in 5.000 seconds = 315.200 FPS
1568 frames in 5.001 seconds = 313.537 FPS

My cpu is intel Q6700 quad core, with 4G ram, and the video card is ATI HD2400Pro, monitor is 24inch, with 1920x1200 resolution.

I just did a fresh full installation of slackware 13.0, it detects all my hardware automatically and set the resolution correct.Everything works fine, but I feel not smooth (can see the frames "jumping") when I drag the windows. so I run glxgears, and got the result above. Is that normal for my computer?

If not, how can I tune the system to make it better? I am a newbie in Xorg. Thanks!

I have close to the same system and I get the same FPS when I used the default gfx modules that come with Slackware. If you get ATI proprietary drivers (which still suck) you will get much higher, I get around 3k fps with it. But I'm also running kernel 2.6.27.7 and slack 12.2. Warning: this can be a tedious and error prone process. ATI has very poor support for Linux.

Thanks! Then I will just work like this and don't bother tuning it.

Those numbers are about right. Your card is just new enough to not be fully supported by the OSS drivers. If you want a bit of improvement with dragging windows around and playing video, try the 2.6.30.5 kernel in testing. It will provide EXA and XV video acceleration.

This card and newer should have OSS 3D support perhaps within 6 to 12 months. It could happen sooner; it may take forever. 3D support for older ATI cards is currently underway in various git branches of mesa, xf86-video-radeon, and kernel drm. They have gears running at decent rates and even compiz working somewhat. It will probably be not long after this works is completed when the ATI HD 2000 and up cards will get support.

Support for this card should be fairly good. You have two options.

1. Get fglrx (catalyst) working. This involves compiling a custom kernel with msi options enabled (under Bus Options in the kernel configuration) and then run the ati*.run installer.

2. Alter your xorg.conf to run radeon or radeonhd.

The first thing I would try for slackware 13 is to rename xorg.conf so that there is no xorg.conf, and then startx. If you try this, post your results.

This is very close to accurate, but I just want to clarify a few things...

compiz and gears work great on older cards (up to the x1950) and have for months or years (depending on the card). I can play ut2004, openarena, RTCW, and even doom3 (on relatively low settings) with the open source driver on my x850 and x1900.

The ATI HD2000 and up have gears and compiz running somewhat now (but with code that no distribution is currently shipping with). I imagine his GPU will be able to run compiz with the open source drivers (without any significant glitches) within a month or two though, being a complex driver, you are right that it could be much longer.

I installed fglrx on a machine here with a fresh install of Slackware 13, without compiling a custom kernel. It works flawlessly. This is amd64, so maybe the custom kernel is really only needed for i386?

He won't have 2D acceleration. A 2.6.30.* kernel is needed to get DRM support in the kernel, which is required for 2D acceleration. The testing kernel should provide this, and then he'd have EXA and Xv support. Still no 3D, though, at least for a couple of months probably.

I've been playing with OpenBSD tonight, and the non accelerated 'nv' driver was giving me 320 ish fps, so that looks about right for a box without any gpu assistance.

Slackware-13.0 comes with fairly recent libdrm, mesa, xf86-video-ati, and xf86-video-radeonhd. I think 2D should be pretty good with those. Edit: remove rest of sentence.

You're right for the 3D for the hd2000+ cards. These need agd5f's 3d drm from git as well as up to date mesa which is very dynamic.

A couple of links (one and two) suggest 2D acceleration, EXA, and XV already work. My experince with the hd3200 supports this as well.

Yes, they already work. I said as much :-) They require DRM support, though, and that didn't go into the kernel till 2.6.30.

Adam

This applies to Slackware 12.2 definitely, though I don't think it applies to 13. It certainly doesn't apply to the x86_64 Slackware 13 release anyway.

You might be right. I've been compiling the drm package and specifically also the radeon and drm modules from linux-core which produces radeon.ko and drm.ko. The rest of the drm package is in (slackware's) libdrm. I don't think I've ever tried the drm.ko and radeon.ko that come with the slackware-13.0 kernels, or that from 2.6.27.31.

The drm modules in 2.6.30 definitely allow good 2d for r6xx cards.

The reason I was staying with 2.6.27 kernels was because catalyst wouldn't install for 2.6.29 and I had problems (for whatever reason with .28)

I don't remember if I tried yet with catalyst 9.8 to see if they fixed the msi and overall installation/compilation with 2.6.29 and .30 kernels. I'll try that if I get bored.

Supposedly some progress, perhaps in finding an error, was made with the open source 3d drivers in the past 24 hours and I'm trying that now.

FYI, Catalyst 9.8 should work. It installed fine here without any MSI related problems, and with the default Slackware 13.0 kernel.

Also, just so you know, the radeon DRM development is no longer done in the /mesa/drm freedesktop git repo. The developers all have their own personal repos and submit patches to the linux kernel directly.

Adam

I've never really followed that. The main drm I've been interested in was that which helped 3d for my card (r6xx+, selfish of me huh). That has been the 3d part of agd5f for some time. Alex works for AMD. This, I don't think is in 2.6.30 but might be staged for 2.6.31 or maybe 2.6.32.