# How suck is ATI driver?

## wokick

Since the first day I installed Gentoo on my machine, I have used ATI fglrx driver for the FireGL 8800 graphics card. I am quite unhappy with its performance. Yesterday, I sundenly had an idea that probably the open source drm driver may provide me better result. So I emerged x11-drm package, and modified the xorg.conf file. Restart X. ooops! 

```

$ glxinfo | grep direct

direct rendering: Yes

```

OK. Now glxgears gives me 2000 fps. But with fglrx driver, only 1600fps. I know that glxgears is not for benchmark, so I fired up a protein visualization software, which require high support of 3D acceralation, renderd a protein and export it to a png file. Yeah, open source drm driver does do better. 

Now, you know how suck is ATI driver. 

Section of x11-drm driver in xorg.conf (for safe startup of x server, I commented out several lines which can boost up performance[/code]):

```

Section "Device"

    Identifier                          "ATI Graphics Adapter"

    Driver                              "radeon"

    BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"

    #Option "RenderAccel" "true"

    #Option "AGPMode" "4"

    #Option "AGPFastWrite" "True"

    #Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"

    Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no" 

EndSection

```

Section of fglrx driver in xorg.conf

```

Section "Device"

    Identifier                          "ATI Graphics Adapter"

    Driver                              "fglrx"

# ### generic DRI settings ###

# === disable PnP Monitor  ===

    #Option                              "NoDDC"

# === disable/enable XAA/DRI ===

    Option "no_accel"                   "no"

    Option "no_dri"                     "no"

# === misc DRI settings ===

    Option "mtrr"                       "off" # disable DRI mtrr mapper, driver has its own code f

or mtrr

# ### FireGL DDX driver module specific settings ###

# === Screen Management ===

    Option "DesktopSetup"               "0x00000000" 

    Option "MonitorLayout"              "AUTO, AUTO"

    Option "IgnoreEDID"                 "off"

    Option "HSync2"                     "unspecified" 

    Option "VRefresh2"                  "unspecified" 

    Option "ScreenOverlap"              "0" 

# === TV-out Management ===

    Option "NoTV"                       "yes"     

    Option "TVStandard"                 "NTSC-M"     

    Option "TVHSizeAdj"                 "0"     

    Option "TVVSizeAdj"                 "0"     

    Option "TVHPosAdj"                  "0"     

    Option "TVVPosAdj"                  "0"     

    Option "TVHStartAdj"                "0"     

    Option "TVColorAdj"                 "0"     

    Option "GammaCorrectionI"           "0x00000000"

    Option "GammaCorrectionII"          "0x00000000"

# === OpenGL specific profiles/settings ===

    Option "Capabilities"               "0x00000000"

# === Video Overlay for the Xv extension ===

    Option "VideoOverlay"               "on"

# === OpenGL Overlay ===

# Note: When OpenGL Overlay is enabled, Video Overlay

#       will be disabled automatically

    Option "OpenGLOverlay"              "off"

# === Center Mode (Laptops only) ===

    Option "CenterMode"                 "off"

# === Pseudo Color Visuals (8-bit visuals) ===

    Option "PseudoColorVisuals"         "on"

# === QBS Management ===

    Option "Stereo"                     "off"

    Option "StereoSyncEnable"           "1"

# === FSAA Management ===

    Option "FSAAEnable"                 "yes"

    Option "FSAAScale"                  "6"

    Option "FSAADisableGamma"           "no"

   Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos"         "yes"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX0"                "0.250000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY0"                "0.416666"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX1"                "0.083333"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY1"                "0.083333"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX2"                "0.416666"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY2"                "0.750000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX3"                "0.750000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY3"                "0.916666"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX4"                "0.583333"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY4"                "0.250000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX5"                "0.916666"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY5"                "0.583333"

# === Misc Options ===

    Option "UseFastTLS"                 "0"

    Option "BlockSignalsOnLock"         "on"

    Option "UseInternalAGPGART"         "no"

    Option "ForceGenericCPU"            "no"

    BusID "PCI:1:0:0"    # vendor=1002, device=5148

    Screen 0

EndSection

```

----------

## wokick

Oh. My god, 

uncomment this line below gives me 2700 fps, and render even faster. 

```

Option "EnablePageFlip" "True" 

```

----------

## naviathan

Interesting...What ATI card are you using?

----------

## withoutclass

 *naviathan wrote:*   

> Interesting...What ATI card are you using?

 

first line of the post....

----------

## TheRealElch

I think with your fglrx-xorg-config you're using Full Scene Anti-Aliasing which reduce the number of rendered frames per second.

Maybe you try it that way:

```

# === FSAA Management ===

    Option "FSAAEnable"                 "no"

    Option "FSAAScale"                  "1"

    Option "FSAADisableGamma"           "no"

    Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos"         "no"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX0"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY0"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX1"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY1"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX2"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY2"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX3"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY3"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX4"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY4"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosX5"                "0.000000"

    Option "FSAAMSPosY5"                "0.000000"

```

Also try using Internal AGPGart and BlockSignalsOnLock,maybe its faster  :Wink: 

Would be interessting to know

```

    Option "BlockSignalsOnLock"         "on"

    Option "UseInternalAGPGART"         "yes"

```

----------

## abester

as an indirect solution to your problem, I suggest you consider the following. 

ATI traditionally has poor OpenGL support, and OpenGL _is_ the true tried & tested 3D api for a lot of platforms and OS'es (save one Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned) including Linux. So therefore consider switching to Nvidia and helping them, since they do a lot of developing for the OpenGL community, not to mention that general ATI support for linux just plain sucks, whereas Nvidia's could be better as well, its a lot better!

----------

## withoutclass

 *abester wrote:*   

> as an indirect solution to your problem, I suggest you consider the following. 
> 
> ATI traditionally has poor OpenGL support, and OpenGL _is_ the true tried & tested 3D api for a lot of platforms and OS'es (save one Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned) including Linux. So therefore consider switching to Nvidia and helping them, since they do a lot of developing for the OpenGL community, not to mention that general ATI support for linux just plain sucks, whereas Nvidia's could be better as well, its a lot better!

 

haha, i can attest to that, a week or so ago i talked to one of their customer service people merely trying to merely give them the suggestion to get 1280x800 added back into their driver, and the response i got was "the driver comes as is, thank you for using ati" lol

----------

## wokick

 *TheRealElch wrote:*   

> I think with your fglrx-xorg-config you're using Full Scene Anti-Aliasing which reduce the number of rendered frames per second.
> 
> Maybe you try it that way:
> 
> ```
> ...

 

Same thing.  :Sad: 

I think I will just forget about its shitty proprietory driver.

----------

## stefandoesinger

Well, the radeon driver does not perform better in all cases.

Situations where the fglrx driver does a better job are gl-117(radeon crash), ut2004(radeon unplayably slow), and a lot of Windows games run with Wine(Jedi academy, Call of duty, Battlefield 1942 tested here).

I prefer the radeon driver in non-gaming situations, as fglrx used to crash in earlier versions, and it doesn't work with S3 or S4 suspend, which is quite bad on a notebook.

However, the fglrx driver is getting better and better with each version, I didn't experiance a single crash in the last months, and it's performance is increasing. Hopefully they'll add support for suspend too(They driver just has to do a better re-init of the card when switching from text console to X11)

I still recommend nvidia cards for everyone who is going to use 3D capatiblities in Linux

----------

## withoutclass

 *stefandoesinger wrote:*   

> Well, the radeon driver does not perform better in all cases.
> 
> Situations where the fglrx driver does a better job are gl-117(radeon crash), ut2004(radeon unplayably slow), and a lot of Windows games run with Wine(Jedi academy, Call of duty, Battlefield 1942 tested here).
> 
> I prefer the radeon driver in non-gaming situations, as fglrx used to crash in earlier versions, and it doesn't work with S3 or S4 suspend, which is quite bad on a notebook.
> ...

 

if it wasn't such a pain/expensive to change, i would attempt to switch with my laptop, but I dont know how well that would work in my centrino system  :Sad: 

----------

## 01mf02

2700 FPS in glxgears? Terrible!

On my laptop with an Intel chipset and onboard graphics I get 800.000 FPS in glxgears!

So maybe there are still options you could change to improve your performance?

----------

## maverick256

 *01mf02 wrote:*   

> 2700 FPS in glxgears? Terrible!
> 
> On my laptop with an Intel chipset and onboard graphics I get 800.000 FPS in glxgears!
> 
> So maybe there are still options you could change to improve your performance?

 

eh, is that 800.000 fps, or 800,000 fps?   :Wink: 

----------

## linuxtuxhellsinki

LOL   :Razz: 

----------

## sirtalon42

 *01mf02 wrote:*   

> 2700 FPS in glxgears? Terrible!
> 
> On my laptop with an Intel chipset and onboard graphics I get 800.000 FPS in glxgears!
> 
> So maybe there are still options you could change to improve your performance?

 

If you have a choice of which you buy, get NVIDIA!  I get ~10,000 (thats 10 thousand) in glxgears.  Every game I've tried runs amazingly (I'm gonna install Quake4 sometime this weekend and see if its faster on Linux than on Windows like UT2k4 is, also alt+tab doesn't work in Windows with Quake4, and xinit always works in Linux).

I have a GoForce 5200 in my laptop and even it kicks ass.

----------

## bobpaul

 *abester wrote:*   

> as an indirect solution to your problem, I suggest you consider the following. 
> 
> ATI traditionally has poor OpenGL support, 

 

I find this to be an odd comment. ATI has had WAY better OpenGL support than nVidia for a long time. They're cards are always an implementation or two ahead of nVidia cards of the same series. Unfortunately, while ATI might support newer OpenGLs on their hardware, they're linux drivers suck, so only Windows can really use it (and in most cases they just use DirectX anyway)

----------

