Arch Linux

spupy

Member

Registered: 2009-08-12

Posts: 218

My ati video blows or is something wrong?

The video card I have on my laptop is Ati Xpress 200 M, running it with the open source drivers. Running games with wine is almost impossible. The only game I got to run with reasonable performance was Icy Tower. For example, Dwarf Fortress takes more than one minute to play only the welcome screen, forget about playing; some random touhou shooter game reported 1 fps. GlxGears reports ~80fps, although I have no idea how good that is or if it is a sane benchmark at all. GlxInfo says there is direct rendering. Here are the versions of packages that look related to graphics and wine (dunno lol):
xf86-video-ati: 6.12.4-1
xf86-video-vesa: 2.2.0-1
xorg-server: 1.6.3-4
wine: 1.1.32-1
(I'm not using the latest xorg because with it my computer locks up after several minutes of usage. I haven't had time yet to address this issue.)
Now, it is quite possible that everything is correct with the hardware and the software, and the problem is just my sucky video card. Can you tell which one it is?

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There are two types of people in this world - those who can count to 10 by using their fingers, and those who can count to 1023.

trann

Member

Registered: 2009-10-29

Posts: 32

Re: My ati video blows or is something wrong?

It was my understanding that the open source drivers do not support 3D rendering.  You say 80fps with GLxgears, but I normally get in the 1000s with my binary nvidia drivers.  Have you looked at the radeon or radeonhd driver, or perhaps fglrx?  Your card may not be supported, but its worth looking into.

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: My ati video blows or is something wrong?

The open source driver provides 2D and 3D acceleration, but not for newer chipsets. You should check on the ATI site, if the proprietary driver works with your card.

spupy

Member

Registered: 2009-08-12

Posts: 218

Re: My ati video blows or is something wrong?

It was my understanding that the open source drivers do not support 3D rendering.  You say 80fps with GLxgears, but I normally get in the 1000s with my binary nvidia drivers.  Have you looked at the radeon or radeonhd driver, or perhaps fglrx?  Your card may not be supported, but its worth looking into.

The open source driver provides 2D and 3D acceleration, but not for newer chipsets. You should check on the ATI site, if the proprietary driver works with your card.

I haven't tried the radeonhd driver. I avoided fglrx till now, since there were some problems with mplayer output. That however was under gentoo. I will try installing fglrx and see what happens.

By the way, how can I select the fglrx driver when I'm not using a xorg.conf?

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There are two types of people in this world - those who can count to 10 by using their fingers, and those who can count to 1023.

Nezmer

Member

Registered: 2008-10-24

Posts: 559

Website

Re: My ati video blows or is something wrong?

By the way, how can I select the fglrx driver when I'm not using a xorg.conf?

You have to use one(A minimal one would do).

Create one with "aticonfig --init"(1) then remove everything you don't need. More info available in the wiki and "aticonfig --help".

(1) Part of catalyst-utils package.

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English is not my native language .

ChemBro

Member

Registered: 2008-10-22

Posts: 703

Re: My ati video blows or is something wrong?

By the way, how can I select the fglrx driver when I'm not using a xorg.conf?

Don't use fglrx. The driver doesn't support your video card anymore (only HD2xxx and above). Your only option is xf86-video-ati. If you want a better experience, you have 2 choices:

1.) Wait for the gallium drivers (they are in the works). It should boost your performance quite a bit.

2.) Okay, this is not a good choice. You may know, what I want to say. The Ati Xpress 200 M isn't a fast one.