Improve older/xorg xserver based ATI/RADEON gfx card performance.

[Hootiegibbon]

disclaimer ***** If you use this tip please note you do so at your own risk****** /disclaimer

I recently obtained a IBM T42 laptop, that although I was truly impressed with overall, I found myself underwhelmed with its graphics performance (was iirc circa 400fps via glxgears)

The card in this machine is

[jason@Hootiegibbon ~]$ lspci |grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

So I hit the search function and located a few tweaks that you can make to your xorg.conf to improve the performance.

This is ATI/Radeon specific using the ati xorg gfx server, there are other 'options' available for other gfx cards

In order to get this in place you need to edit xorg.conf,

REMEMBER YOU WILL NEED TO EDIT THIS AS ROOT TAKE CARE AND DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK

start up the file manager navigate to /etc/X11/ locate the xorg.conf file then rightclick and choose the edit s root option (alternatly start your favoite text editor as root and point it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Locate this section

Section "Device"
    Identifier "device1"
    Driver "ati"
    Option "DPMS"

Then add the following lines

Option "AccelMethod" "exa" #(can help with composite - comment out if want to use xaa)
Option "AccelDFS" "true"  
Option "BusType" "AGP"     #(use only if internalAGP based card)
Option "AGPMode" "4"   #(can use 8 if card is capable check out result of dmesg |grep agp)
Option "EnableDepthMoves" "on"
Option "FBTexPercent" "80"
Option "BackingStore" "true"
Option "EXAOptimizeMigration" "true"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "ScalerWidth" "2048"  #Remove/comment out this if screen has pink / discoloured arears)
Option "RenderAccel" "on"      #will disable compositing at login
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"   #will disable compositing at login
Option "DynamicClocks" "off"
Option "ExaNoComposite" "false"

So that it reads

Section "Device"
    Identifier "device1"
    Driver "ati"
    Option "DPMS"
Option "AccelMethod" "exa" #(can help with composite - comment out if want to use xaa)
Option "AccelDFS" "true"  
Option "BusType" "AGP"     #(use only if internalAGP based card)
Option "AGPMode" "4"   #(can use 8 if card is capable check out result of dmesg |grep agp)
Option "EnableDepthMoves" "on"
Option "FBTexPercent" "80"
Option "BackingStore" "true"
Option "EXAOptimizeMigration" "true"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "ScalerWidth" "2048"   #Remove/comment out this if screen has pink / discoloured arears)
Option "RenderAccel" "on"
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "DynamicClocks" "off"
Option "ExaNoComposite" "false"

then restart X (log out log in)
To see which options have worked you can open a Konsole and use the following cli commands

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log |grep RADEON >/home/username/Documents/RADEONoutput.txt

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log |grep Option >/home/username/Documents/OptionOutput.txt

or just

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log >/home/username/Documents/XorgLogOutput.txt for the full xorg.log

this will show if any Option is not used,  (if it shows as not used then remove it)

I hope that this tip is of use, It does result here in an improvement to glxgears in the region of an extra 250 fps.

Jase

[Hootiegibbon]

Folks,

Here is some additional information, especially of interest to those that want to have composting working on boot and have the following card (likly to effect further cards though so worth a try if having thie problem)

VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

Of the options above there are two that cause compositing to be disabled on KDE4 start up.

If you find this to be the case then comment out or remove the following options

#Option "RenderAccel" "on"
#Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"

I have added comments to the above post to point this out.

Jase

[menotu]

Nice post Jase.