ATI Radeon Fedora 10

[messner]

Hello, I have this card in my notebook:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility F
ireGL 9000] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation Device 0860
Flags: bus master, stepping, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 128, IRQ 10
Memory at 98000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
Memory at 90400000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at 90420000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Kernel modules: radeon, radeonfb


I think gnome is rather slow with everyday work (Firefox switching tabs, moving windows, mouse clicks ..)

Where do I start to repair this ?

[LBCoder]

That is an R200 chip... though supported quite nicely by the open source drivers, it (and the rest of your laptop) is very old and really not that well suited for a modern OS like F10. You should look into a light-weight DE instead of gnome, like LXDE. Alternatively, a light-weight distro or a new computer.

[messner]

That is an R200 chip... though supported quite nicely by the open source drivers, it (and the rest of your laptop) is very old and really not that well suited for a modern OS like F10. You should look into a light-weight DE instead of gnome, like LXDE. Alternatively, a light-weight distro or a new computer.

I don't agreee with you. I have been using this laptop with many Fedoras. And it is fast enough for me. Top shows 7% CPU and 10% mem usage activity while writing this.

I am using Eclipse, OpenOffice, media players, everything works very fast ... I am even running Tomcat on it sometimes. Everything works fast, programs don't wait, OpenOffice starts in 5-6 seconds ... only windows rendering is slow.

I have 1.5 Mhz processor and 1 GB RAM. I am torturing this poor machine with external monitor and 1920 x 1200 resolution ;)

But. I still think that graphics is a bit slower as it was. KDE works much more lively, except Firefox, that acts little lasy in KDE also.

This machine works beautifull with Fedora 10. Only windows moving and switching is little slow. That wasn't the case with Fedora 9. It was little slower, but now it seems even slower. It doesn't really bugs me so much, but it would be nice if that would't happen.

Sometimes all the fonts on screen get green, and sometimes the text in some of the windows just disapear. When I restart the program, everything gets nice again.

[jesse_kahtava]

This is a big problem for most people with older Radeons and seems to be popping up all over Bugzilla and the forums. Here's (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=205142) a post with what I did to speed it up a bit. Still isn't as fast as Fedora 9, but it's more useable

[Hlingler]

You probably don't want to hear this either, but you already said it yourself: 1920 x 1200 is too high of a resolution for that chipset. Reduce it to improve performance. Another option, if you can tolerate it, is to drop color depth to 16 bpp, and sacrifice quality for speed. That buys you 2X speed of 24/32 bpp color.

You can also install package driconf and play with the DRI settings. Run it the FIRST TIME ONLY as root user to generate default /etc/drirc file, then as normal user to set preferences.

Finally: consider XFCE4 desktop as an alternative to GNOME. It's GTK-based, and "feels" like a light-weight GNOME DE.

V

[LBCoder]

I don't agreee with you.

1920 x 1200 resolution ;)

That wasn't the case with Fedora 9. It was little slower, but now it seems even slower.

As software gets more complex, the machine requirements for running it equally increases. That means that F10 WILL BE SLOWER than F9 was on the same hardware. Get used to it or stick with something older.

[jesse_kahtava]

Though that may be true for significant upgrades, it should not be true from F9 to F10.
Think of the boot process. This has been getting FASTER with each subsequent release.

Currently there are regressions with the open source radeon driver which seem to be due to the work with modesetting and EXA. I expect that eventually the driver will be as fast as it previously was, but right now it is not. The upgrade from Gnome 2.22 to 2.24 should not add strain on the system.
I am experiencing the same problems as messner and it's not due to Fedora being slower, it's because of the graphics driver.

[karlpiuemeno]

I quote jesse kahtava. They're doing lot of work on radeon, and it's very very buggy.

I have a X1050....(based on R350) ... 256MB DDR2 etc... and in fedora 10 is....slooooooooooooow.... I had to switch off modesetting to have some graphics on nexuiz game...but still buggy (nexuiz crashed after 10 minutes...) and sloooow.....


They are rewriting most of code for exa support and I think the performance will come back soon as in the old driver... Just a month ago the radeon driver was (for me) unusable...

[karlpiuemeno]

one more thing... I think that the slowness of radeon + fedora is in "default" EXA acceleration method... (before fedora 10, radeon was used with XAA acceleration)..

so...who has problems like me, just put this stuff on his xorg.conf (create one with the old system-config-display)

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
EndSection


this will make work your pc until the exa acceleration will be improved for us...

[messner]

Thank you guyz and girls ... You made many suggestions, I will try them out. I just have to mention, that Fedora 10 is awesome and also very fast on my old computer. I will keep my outer monitor with 1920x1200 (22'), because it is excellent to work with. As I said, graphics rendering is a bit slow, but usable. But all other stuff (programs, servers, ...) are running really fast ... highly enjoyable experience ...

Fedora developers , thank you for the good work :cool:

I will let you know, what I find out.

[rphegde]

For what it is worth, I tried kubuntu and mandriva to see what the performance is. glxgears gives around 2000 FPS on kubuntu and mandriva has 3000. On Fedora 10, I have around 300 !! and the performance sucks. flash is unplayable even wihout compiz. F9 was pretty was good. (Mandriva has xorg 1.4 but kubuntu has 1.5).

[messner]

For what it is worth, I tried kubuntu and mandriva to see what the performance is. glxgears gives around 2000 FPS on kubuntu and mandriva has 3000. On Fedora 10, I have around 300 !! and the performance sucks. flash is unplayable even wihout compiz. F9 was pretty was good. (Mandriva has xorg 1.4 but kubuntu has 1.5).

Finally someone measure's it ... so I wasn't hallucinating .... :p

[WileECoyote]

It might be worth checking you are actualy using the radeon driver. I had similar problems, but when I checked my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file it showed I was on the vesa driver. I copied the lines I found in the link below into the relevant section of the xorg.conf and hey presto, glxgears goes from 400 fps to about 4000! Happy days.

http://www.linuxinsight.com/your-ati-radeon-very-slow-on-xorg-x-server-1.3.html