Arch Linux

fax8

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 104

Website

Xorg ATI drivers: fullscreen video play frames dropped and 80% CPU

Hi everybody,

I just completed upgrading to Xorg 1.6.
In the process we lost the possibility to use the AMD/ATI proprietary Catalyst (aka fglrx) drivers and now Archlinux only supports the Xorg radeon and radeonhd open source drivers. I perfectly understand the reasons for this move and support the developers for this.

So, I dropped the Catalyst drivers and configured Xorg to use radeon as the device driver.

Unfortunately this gives me some weird problems:
* fonts looks different: I can't explain exactly.. a bit bigger and thinner.
* making a video playback fullscreen with VLC results in frame dropping and very poor frame rate

I tried adding some of the performance tuning options
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI … nce_tuning
but nothing changed.

I then tried the other open source driver: radeonhd.. with that the font looks the same but I'm still experiencing the fullscreen video problem.

my video card is:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]

Anyone can help on this?

Thanks,

Fabio Varesano

app4des

Member

Registered: 2009-02-18

Posts: 39

Re: Xorg ATI drivers: fullscreen video play frames dropped and 80% CPU

The open source drivers (ati / radeonhd) do not deliver as good performance as the fglrx. Myself with the x1250 I can't play any video on my 22" monitor at full screen. The x1950pro however that I also have can play full screen easily.

You should first make sure that you have "exa" acceleration enabled. In the xorg.conf in the device section make sure you have:

Option "AccelMethod" "exa".

If that doesn't work try to experiment with the VLC video output (from the it's options). Test between XV, X11 and OpenGL outputs and see what plays best for you.

fax8

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 104

Website

Re: Xorg ATI drivers: fullscreen video play frames dropped and 80% CPU

Ops.. seems that after rebooting the video playback problems run away..

Actually from "man radeonhd":

After using the fglrx driver, radeonhd might fail to work properly. This  combi‐
nation  is not and probably will never be supported.  A reboot fixes problems in
most cases, sometimes a powercycle is necessary.  Unloading the kernel module is
typically not enough.

So.. probably that's what was causing my problems .. as I did not reboot after uninstall fglrx.

Now I'm using radeonhd as with radeon I still had the slightly bigger fonts problem.

But under radeonhd fonts and videos looks good so I'm pretty satisfied!

Thanks for help me on this.

Last edited by fax8 (2009-04-12 22:21:22)

Wra!th

Member

Registered: 2009-03-31

Posts: 342

Re: Xorg ATI drivers: fullscreen video play frames dropped and 80% CPU

I have the exact same video card and I experienced high cpu usage when in fullscreen after reboot also.
Just in case anyone has this problem, my fix was simple:
I fixed it by using the xv video output with mplayer (used x11 previouslly)
Now I get max 10% usage when in fullscreen

Last edited by Wra!th (2009-04-13 06:09:42)

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