ATI users: here's hope you enjoy...

[DarkFoss]

I've been mucking around all weekend trying to find a way to tweak the xorg.conf file to improve my cards dismal performance. A fortunate round of Googling led me to a couple new sites. 1 in particular really turned things around for me.

 

http://www.phoronix.net/forums/showthread.php?t=151

 

The above forum has a guy that goes by dgvirtual made a script thats a gui front end for aticonfig . It's really an awesome bit of scripting it can be found here :

 

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=43612

 

You'll need to install kommander if you don't have it already. It's a kde app and it's in the main repository under Graphical desktop/KDE .

 

It's pretty easy to use.. it has to be for me to be able to use it :P

 

I used it to save the original file with working AIGLX then went ahead and installed the plf drivers and used it to create a new working xorg.conf after backing that new one up you can litterally reinstall either back-up to toggle back and forth between AIGLX and XGL . I still have some minor tweaks left to do but it's worked out great. I went from a glxgear score of an average of 250 to :

 

[larry@localhost ~]$ glxgears

42287 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8457.336 FPS

40190 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8037.881 FPS

40573 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8114.524 FPS

40574 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8114.646 FPS

40577 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8115.233 FPS

40561 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8112.111 FPS

[larry@localhost ~]$ fgl_glxgears

Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer

5128 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1025.600 FPS

5615 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1123.000 FPS

5820 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1164.000 FPS

5814 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1162.800 FPS

5805 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1161.000 FPS

5811 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1162.200 FPS

 

A nice improvement concidering I'm running my desktop at 1280x1024 FSAA enabled set at 2 and using the XV video overylay extention.

ppracer averages about 110 fps with FSAA set at 2 as well chromium is a rock solid 50 fps.

 

Too bad from what I've read the author is going to abandon this script since he has bought a laptop with intel graphics.

I wish I knew anything about scripting, I'll really miss this when it's no longer able to function. It works well with the plf 8.28.8 drivers.It's also been ported to a few other distros but the generic script I downloaded works fine.

 

I can't really write a how to yet since I'm still exploring the settings. The only negative so far is a bit of spotting at the edges of the OGL screensavers and at the configuration screen for ppracer nt during the game. Not sure if it's a settingsuch as "UseFastTLS" "on" or

due to my monitor being Generically configured for now.

 

I've rambled on enough for now hehe enjoy !

 

ps.

Sorry if I've posted in the wrong place I seem to have a knack for it.. but even though I'm running rc2 this should help all ati users no matter what they are running.. I also posted this at Mandriva

[DarkFoss]

I've posted more info at the Mandriva forum since someone asked a few questions rather than repost it all here's the link.

 

http://forum.mandrivaclub.com/viewtopic.php?p=252243#252243

 

 

Also in that thread is my current working xorg.conf file and an explaination about a few things I changed after running the script.