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I have two machines both running fully up to date. One computer has a an AMD FX-8320 with a 5xxx series Radeon card. The other has an FX-6300 with a 6450 Radeon card. Both are running the AMD opensource drivers. I have also set Glamor in the xorg config files. However, I experience lag in the interface. It is most noticeable when:
1) minimizing/unminimizing windows
2) The lock screen slide animation
3) the activities overview.
Changing my CPU governor to performance helps the situation a bit, but not completely.
Also, running Arch on both my Zenbook and my primary desktop with a Core i7-2600k and NVIDIA 660Ti the animations are totally fluid which makes me think that the fault lies with the AMD OSS video driver setup with an outside shot that it has to do with how the CPU frequency is interacting with Gnome.
Finally, I should also add that KDE doesn't experience any of these issues on the AMD machines.
I've looked at the various suggested tweaks, but not found anything that fixes the issue.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
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Have you tried turning off vsync? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Turn_vsync_off
It makes a huge difference for me, but screen tearing is an issue..
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Yes, I should have mentioned that, no matter what, I want vsync on. Having said that, I bumped my FX-6300 clock speed up a bit in the bios. It is now MUCH smoother. Perhaps the FX chips simple don't have the single threaded IPC needed to run Gnome smoothly, despite running KDE just fine.
On a semi-related note, I tried Arch with Gnome on an old Athlon X2 with a NVIDIA GT610 card. This was also much smoother than my original non overclocked config despite having a much weaker CPU.
I don't know what exactly to take away from this except Gnome seems to be sensitive to CPU clock speed and potentially even more so depending on what video card the CPU is paired with.
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Have you tried without glamor? I have a 6570 and it works well with the default configuration (i.e. no configuration at all). I remember problems with glamor. In my case the OSS works very well with no problems (it works well with the desktop effect in KDE). I have benchmarked both drivers (catalyst and OSS) with qgears ans several Unigene benchmarks and it appears that the OSS drivers give about 70-75% percent of FPS of what we get with catalyst. A little less good but not that big. Moreover the OSS driver supports vdpau and give better benchmarks with gtkperf than catalyst.
Last edited by olive (2014-10-15 17:37:02)
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6 months ago Glamor would give rendering artifacts, but now it seems to be stable. I've tried both Glamor and standard EXA and gotten similar results. The CPU overclocking, though strange, seems to alleviate the lag.
I always prefer the open driver because Catalyst is so awful. I use NVIDIA if I need powerful 3D, but for everything else I like going with AMD cards because of the open drivers.
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Hi lakerssuperman,
It's been one year since I try to find someone that get the same result. I'm experiencing exactly the same, open source radeon driver causes some lag on the activities view.
Tested on a mobility HD3450, mobility HD6450, and desktop as well with a HD4850 and a HD6950.
Both desktop cards run smooth when using the wayland session of gnome, but even if it's a little bit better for the mobile cards too, it still does lag.
I don't get it, on my hd 3000 mobile, gnome is really smooth, I guess HD6450m is more powerful or about the same as intel gpu. So yes, there is some issues with 2D rendering on FOSS radeon driver.
And it's really visible when using low or middle end cards.
Can you tell me if you have same results ?
ps: +1 for the cpu governor to performance mod
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