[Solved] ATI (KDE?) draw problem. Scrolling up is leaving tracers...

Gen2ly · 2010-02-22 05:14:26

Trying to setup an old laptop and everything is going good so far. I got everything about as I need except the graphic card(?) is giving me problems. I typically work with a smaller window on top of another and use the scroll to look through content on a lower window (like a web-browser) while the original window stays on top. If I scroll up while doing this it will leave tracer marks:

Yeah, I could even get it in a snapshot. I used 'X --configure' to create my xorg.conf but I also tried without an xorg.conf with the same effect. The graphic card is older:

lspci:        VGA compatible controller : ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M 
factory list: ATI MOBILITY RADEON 4X AGP and 3D architecture     64MB DDR SDRAM (shared)

64 MB of memory shouldn't be a problem I'd think ("1024*768*24" = 18874368). Am using KDE 4.4 without desktop effects. The odd thing here is that if I enable Desktop Effects in KDE the tracers stop. However... it is REAL slow when I do this (scrolling), desktop effects... Am using the 'xf86-video-ati' driver. Any thoughts on what I might try to fix this?

Last edited by Gen2ly (2010-02-23 04:18:13)

Gen2ly · 2010-02-23 01:27:26

Been trying it for the last half-hour and it looks like this is a kde/qt bug. I know the programmers of Qt added a lot of better/more-advanced rendering abilities to Qt (basically for newer cards). Thinking because my card is old, and that the xf86-video-ati driver is still relatively new, that there is something going on. I have discovered, that when I enable Desktop Effects and then disable it again well, it works fine... at least for the last half hour . Even got air, panel theme to look right:

Perhaps I'll try the catalyst driver in the future here and see if it helps.

Gen2ly · 2010-02-23 04:16:59

Ok, got this figured out. Forgot to add AGPMode to my xorg.conf which makes a big difference. Still got the black air panel bar on the bottom if not using Desktop Effects but actually it looks like I might not need it. On this old graphic card I pretty much figured DE was pretty much out, but actually DE aren't too bad, and the tracers are gone so I'm pretty happy.

Gen2ly · 2010-04-09 23:11:17

Actually this turned out to be the drop down terminal which was thinking that transparency was enabled. Enabling compositing in my xorg.conf fixed this:

Section "DRI"
  Group "video"
  Mode  0666
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
  Option "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
  Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Arch Linux

#1 2010-02-22 05:14:26

[Solved] ATI (KDE?) draw problem. Scrolling up is leaving tracers...

#2 2010-02-23 01:27:26

Re: [Solved] ATI (KDE?) draw problem. Scrolling up is leaving tracers...

#3 2010-02-23 04:16:59

Re: [Solved] ATI (KDE?) draw problem. Scrolling up is leaving tracers...

#4 2010-04-09 23:11:17

Re: [Solved] ATI (KDE?) draw problem. Scrolling up is leaving tracers...

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