OpenGL not working Radeon HD 5450 (Slackware 13.37)
 

Everything was working fine before my Radeon HD5450 went bad, so I replaced it with my old HD4550. Now, everything was laggy and full of visual artifacts (because that card was bad also, but I was able to use my PC until I buy a new card). In a few days, I came with new card (5450 again, it was the cheapest one). The problem is, it's exactly the same card as before, and everything is still laggy, slow, without effects... (I don't think there is something wrong with hardware because on Win7 it runs as it should). Since Google wasn't helpful, and all threads I have read didn't provide me with a solution, I joined this forum to seek for your wisdom.

Here's the sum of my info:

1) Cairo-Dock is extremely laggy

2) MPlayer (interesting...)
When trying to watch a video file, mplayer plays only audio. So when I run gmplayer from terminal,
I get this output in video section:

... however, when I run it just as mplayer, video does open (but can't go to fullscreen).
Here's the output:

...but KPlayer works perfect

3) System Settings/Desktop Effects/Advanced/Compositing type
- it always falls back to XRender

4) glxgears output
- shows 398 fps on small size window, and 37 fps during fullscreen

5) lspci | grep VGA
6) lsmod | grep radeon
7) xvinfo
8) I have run xorgsetup a few times, but nothing changes.

9) I went the route to upgrading x related packages (don't remember which ones) from current,
but some packages were not compatible, so I installed more,more... messed things up :)
Then reverted to original the things I remember I have messed up with

10) I also went reinstalling only base system from DVD, didn't help

Ask for xorg.conf, glxinfo or any other file or output if needed, it's too long to post it right now.

Sorry for long post, I just wanted to be comprehensive.

Hi & Welcome to Linux Questions.

Sorry to hear your old GPU is causing problems.

In that case you may need to purchase another GPU.
Maybe other members will know a way to tweak your GPU if that's possible.

Depending on what version of the kernel you are running it may or may not be providing support for your graphic card. If there isn't support for your old card you should be able to use a proprietary fglrx/Catalyst driver but I'd make that your last resort. All of the AMD drivers I tried were buggy.

I'm not the best with graphics issues but sometimes when one has problems with performance or hardware issues installing a higher version of the kernel can help. Recompiling the kernel may be an option as well.

https://www.kernel.org/

I'm pretty sure jjust about every radeon card should support xv output.
Since the radeon module is loaded, you might want to check your mesa installation.
Can you provide your Xorg.0.log and the output from

Thanks for your reply.

I think you didn't fully understand my issue. I did bought a new GPU, which is exactly the same as one I had before (the one that worked perfect!). As far as my knowledge, it should run smooth out of box. But it doesn't. Weird.
I'm wandering, as I have used other card in between (maybe for 2 or 3 days), did it somehow configure things the wrong way. All I remember is that I had to change some VESA values and configure xorg.conf to enter into runlevel 4. But, after I finally replaced it with a new card, things stayed sluggish.
As far as 2D user experience, it looks and works smooth. But I'm without effects, always on Xrender, Cairo-Dock is very laggy, can't use Mplayer...

I'm not considering fglrx driver, from past experiences they were all buggy for me also. And I really shouldn't, because kernel support obviously did served me well. I just think something isn't configured right.

Correction: I'm using Slackware 14.1

Not to disrupt, but could you please wrap the output of your finding in code tags, please? Reading pages malformed by text can be troublesome.

As far as the device, with any Radeon HD, running the latest kernel, libdrm, xf86-video-ati, and mesa drivers usually helps with some issues.

-Current has progressed greatly, so there is a chance you may benefit from upgrading to -Current from.14.1. Also be sure to check out extra support packages at SlackBuilds.org such as driconf and libtxc_dxtn as they can help with other issues.

Hi hadack.

glxinfo | grep OpenGL
I'll divide Xorg.0.log in two parts, can't post more than 50000 characters
/var/log/Xorg.0.log

Xorg.0.log part 2

Thanks you ReaperX7, will do. Gotta go to work now :(

2 things caught my eye:

You are not using the 3d driver but only cpu rendering.
The output of
might give a hint about the reason.

And X seems to be using the modesetting driver, which is a generic driver for all video cards.
If you created a xorg.conf, try to remove it and start X without one. Normally it would autodetect the right settings for you.

Just a suggestion.. You might want to upgrade to 14.1 and then upgrade your Kernel & mesa . There have been many improvements with the drivers the AMD cards that might help you out.

Upgrading mesa is no small feat on 14.1 and requires upgrading X, llvm, qt, and a few other packages (took me about a week to get it all sorted out, then I had to do everything again on a 32bit VM for multilib). If a newer mesa is desired, it would be much better to upgrade to -current.

To get the most out of that old card you need current even 14.1 is to old to take full advantage of that card.
UVD2.2 support was implemented in mesa 9.2 and 14.1 has mesa 9.1.7 also kernel 3.10 (3.18 for UVD+) is needed and 14.1 has 3.10.17, you also need libvdpau then it should have hw acc video playback through VDPAU.
DPM (Dynamic Power Management) for radeon was introduced with kernel 3.11 (needed radeon.dpm=1 until 3.13) and you shouldn't be using a kernel prior that even if you don't care about UVD support since re-clocking doesn't work prior that and you wont use the full potency of your GPU and everything will feel sluggish.

It might not be too dificult to upgrade 14.1 to Mesa 9.2. I had to upgrade mine to 10.4 because that is when UVD support was added for the HD3000 series cards (I have the HD3870). Between those releases, it required a lot of dependency version bumps, which required other dependencies and on. With this being such a minor jump, the dependency requirements may have not changed too much. And upgrading the kernel is not a big deal.

But I think it would still be much easier to upgrade to -current.

Yes upgrading to current should be a lot easier and then you don't need to upgrade firmware, kernel, mesa and compile libvdpau, and you should upgrade to newer versions then the ones i mentioned since the versions that introduced a feature always contains bugs.
Current is rather stable now so current should be a better choice.

Was UVD+ support introduced in 10.4? i want to remember that it was in the 10.3 series but i could be wrong.

I just know that is when it was introduced for the HD3000 series, and it required the 3.18 kernel (both were RCs when I first started the process of upgrading core components). They could've done work for the HD4000 cards and up prior, since they had vdpau support long before my card had it.

But -current is running beautifully on my HTPC running an AMD 5350 APU. I have full video playback acceleration with kodi out of the box (well, short of compiling kodi and its dependencies). I want to upgrade my desktop to it, to get rid of some of the minor bugs that cropped up when I upgraded those programs, but I'm lazy and don't want to keep up with -current, so I'll just keep my setup until 14.2 is released (well, maybe I'll just wait for the RCs).