# I cant belive xf86-video-ati is trash for a year!

## dE_logics

It's been a year (on 15th apr) since I've been under Linux and in the mean time...the xf86-video-ati version increased from 6.12.2 to 6.12.192 with absolutely no affects to my chip. The acceleration is rotten, as a result compiz is also slow, KMS is unusable, various bugs have persisted for e.g. with blender.

Mine is RS690G chipset...and this time they claim a LOT of bug fixes and better acceleration for R6xx chips...this is a damn lie!!

In windows my chip is good enough to play all games till 2004 with full resolution and detail, and it can easily handle the inefficient aero effects and the rubbish 3-d filp, so it should easily handle compiz...even the intel chips can!...moreover mine claims to give better HD acceleration.

So my question is, is it true that there are really no changes or do I have to tweak something?

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## john.newman

sounds like you may have something set incorrectly.  good luck

but maybe just get a newer card.  6 years is a long time.  what about the ati-drivers package?  the open source drivers were !@#$ for me too.  ati-drivers has my hd3870 working adequately.  still a couple quirks, but almost on par with msft.  the xf86 drivers were total shit

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## dE_logics

It's a lap, so it's not upgradable and it's 2 years old.

Actually it can play almost all games till 2006 (doom 3, full details, same with farcry) but at moderate to low details.

The proprietary ATI drivers package lost support for my chip after version 9.1. They don't work anyway.

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## Ant P.

Try using the git drivers instead. I just fired up UT2004 to check and my HD4350 is getting at least 20-30fps now. A few weeks ago that wouldn't even run without crashing.

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## i92guboj

If the proprietary drivers are not an option, and considering the current status of things, I suggest you to install the x11 overlay, and then use at least libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati from git (9999 ebuilds). Update them frequently. I also suggest you to subscribe to the relevant mailing lists, at least for mesa and the radeon driver, so you can track the bugs and see what's going on.

The 3d support is getting better. It's still not perfect though mostly working for most apps. The performance will vary depending on the concrete opengl subset that a given application uses. Also note that there might be regressions but well, we all know we can use quickpkg before doing "emerge -1 --nodeps libdrm mesa xf86-video-ati xorg-server", don't we?  :Razz: 

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## dE_logics

Yeah, I did use quickpkg when fooling around with xorg-server.

You know the mesa downgraded the performance...that's why I was sticking around with stable branches.

Anyway, I'll try the latest.

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## Mad Merlin

FWIW, despite the naming, your RS690 is not an R600 card, it's actually an R500 based card (or possibly an R400 based card). fglrx dropped support for R500 and earlier about a year ago now, but still supports R600+.

Having said that, KMS + KDE4 compositing works quite nicely with my X1400.

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## dE_logics

 *Mad Merlin wrote:*   

> FWIW, despite the naming, your RS690 is not an R600 card, it's actually an R500 based card (or possibly an R400 based card). fglrx dropped support for R500 and earlier about a year ago now, but still supports R600+.
> 
> Having said that, KMS + KDE4 compositing works quite nicely with my X1400.

 

The graphs chip supposed to be one of the HD series despite it's nomenclature...x1270. It is HD capable in reality.

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## dE_logics

Absolutely no changes. It appears as if the drivers are untouched across all these version upgrades and I've given up hope.

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## i92guboj

Just for the sake of trying, if you post your /var/log/Xorg.0.log I can try to take a look.

If you notice bugs, though, you should be writing to their mailing lists so they become aware and can actually fix them. Maybe you have a very particular board or maybe it's just a configuration issue.

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## dE_logics

http://pastebin.com/fQG6UBvd

The bug with Blender is known. The workaround is make Blender do indirect rendering.

Also Compiz fails with direct rendering and with indirect it's too slow.

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## Raptor85

 *Mad Merlin wrote:*   

> FWIW, despite the naming, your RS690 is not an R600 card, it's actually an R500 based card (or possibly an R400 based card). fglrx dropped support for R500 and earlier about a year ago now, but still supports R600+.
> 
> Having said that, KMS + KDE4 compositing works quite nicely with my X1400.

 

As far as the opensource drivers go, for gaming on a R500 your only real bet is the radeonhd drivers, they're a LOT faster, but personally i found them to be too unstable for normal use at the time. 

For the binary drivers, 9.3 was the last to support R500, i have a patched version of the drivers I modified for my fanless x1550 to work on my 2.6.31.6-rt19 kernel with xorg-server-1.6.5-r1. Kind of a backwards solution but I was able to get ~60 fps in UT2k4 with it, as well as ETQW and Quake4. I don't patch it anymore though, I gave up on my ATI card and bought a gf9800 a while back, so this would only be a temporary solution at best :/  If you want it drop me a PM.

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## i92guboj

I can't see anything obviously wrong in the log, I guess you already did a whole lot of research about this.   :Sad: 

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## newfuntek

You should try to install overlay x11:

```
layman -L; layman -a x11;
```

and insert into /etc/portage/package.unmask

the following lines:

```
=x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-9999

=x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.10*

=x11-libs/libxcb-9999

=x11-proto/xcb-proto-9999

=x11-base/nouveau-drm-99999999

=x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau-9999

=x11-base/xorg-drivers-9999

=x11-apps/mesa-progs-9999

=x11-base/xorg-server-9999

=x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.5.901

=x11-libs/libdrm-9999

=media-fonts/font-util-9999

=media-libs/mesa-9999

=x11-apps/xrandr-9999

=x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-9999

=sys-kernel/linux-firmware-99999999
```

and appropriately change /etc/portage/package.keywords.

All packages are always compiled (sometimes mesa, intel and ati need downgrade from 9999) and work all the time with ksm, ut2004, compiz (compiz causes flash to run slow), metacity, xv and so on.

Of course, after installing packages from git, drivers from qlist -I x11-drivers should be compiled again.

Here for nvidia card owners (not me) instructions:

http://hardenedgentoo.blogspot.com/2010/01/nouveau-driver-with-kms-support-on.html

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## dE_logics

Ok, I'll emerge all those packages, but I really expect not to see any performance gains.

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## dE_logics

1 thing I DO NOT like about the GIT repositories is that they don't compress the sources.

So is this all development version in a sense that the developers make some changes and just upload the changes...and that's exactly what I get? even the smallest change?

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## dE_logics

It appears the DRI is not being enabled. The FPS rates in glxgears has dropped to a fraction, the 2-d acceleration has reduced (it's a bit more sluggish now) and the bug with blender does not persist. No changes even with the root account.

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## Mike Hunt

I'm using these with an RS480 and it works just fine:

```
media-libs/mesa-7.8_rc2

x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.6

x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.12.192
```

Post the output of this please:

```
glxinfo | grep render
```

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## dE_logics

You mean even the compiz works well?

```
glxinfo | grep render

direct rendering: Yes

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RS690 791F) 20090101  NO-TCL
```

However the DRI is very low now...it gives 160 - 200 FPS and earlier it was 350 - 480 FPS.

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## Mike Hunt

Put this in your xorg.conf file. You will see a difference:

```
Section "dri"

        Mode 0666

EndSection
```

I also have these options in xorg.conf:

```
Section "Device"

        Identifier  "Card0"

        Option      "EnablePageFlip"   "on"

        Option      "AGPFastWrite"     "yes"

        Option      "AccelMethod"      "EXA"

        Driver      "radeon"

EndSection
```

Don't know compiz - never used it.

```
 ~ $ glxinfo | grep render

direct rendering: Yes

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RS400 5954) 20090101 x86/MMX+/3DNow!+/SSE2 NO-TCL
```

I'm getting 6794 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1358.724 FPS in glxgears.

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## dE_logics

```
921 frames in 5.0 seconds = 183.925 FPS

897 frames in 5.0 seconds = 179.149 FPS

897 frames in 5.0 seconds = 179.212 FPS

885 frames in 5.0 seconds = 176.965 FPS
```

What about this guy - 

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1231030.html

Actually I tried all those options before.

Another update -- The videos are very slow after the upgrade.

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## Muso

emerge -C ati && emerge nvidia.

Sorry to be blunt, but ATi's horrid Linux drivers drove me away from that company nearly 10 years ago.   I only buy nvidia because of their Linux support.

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## sera

I'm using an RV560(X1650) with all stuff gentoo stable, xf86-video-ati-6.12.5, mesa-7.5.2, xorg-server-1.6.5-r1 and no KMS obviously.

glxgear gives me "21095 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4218.824 FPS".

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## asturm

@Chopinzee: You do realize that this topic isn't about ati-drivers, but the open source xf86-video-ati version which usually works really, really well?

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## dE_logics

 *Chopinzee wrote:*   

> emerge -C ati && emerge nvidia.
> 
> Sorry to be blunt, but ATi's horrid Linux drivers drove me away from that company nearly 10 years ago.   I only buy nvidia because of their Linux support.

 

That's not right. That will break X.

Anyway, it appears that only mine x1270 is the rarest of all cards and so no one cares about it. Even ATI doesn't admit that this card exists! Go to their site, you wont get even the windows drivers for this card. That x1200 series drivers don't work in windows. Only Dell provides drivers for this chip.

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## Ant P.

One more thing you can try:

Enable KMS in the kernel, and if that doesn't help recompile the x11 overlay drivers with USE=+gallium. If it still doesn't work then the only advice I can give you is take it to the xf86-video-ati developers' bugtracker. They're pretty good at getting things fixed when people ask.

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## dE_logics

That USE is not present.

I guess contacting the developers is a good idea.

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## i92guboj

That USE will only be present in the x11 overlay, and for the mesa ebiuld, not xf86-video-ati. However, at the current status of things I doubt that gallium will be any good.

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## dE_logics

It was already compiled with gallium.

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