Fix for old Ati cards under PCLinuxOS 2011 with the xorg 1.9.5

[T6]

remember that glxgears is not a representative tool

right now my ati card gives me 700fps there but i can't run 3d games like neverball

my intel gma 3150 gives me 59 fps on glxgears but i can play neverball perfectly while raining on my desktop(compiz glory!!)


image uploading

[gseaman]

remember that glxgears is not a representative tool

right now my ati card gives me 700fps there but i can't run 3d games like neverball

my intel gma 3150 gives me 59 fps on glxgears but i can play neverball perfectly while raining on my desktop(compiz glory!!)
...

Just for fun, run vblank_mode=0 glxgears on your intel card.

Galen

[T6]

glxgears gives this

295 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.965 FPS

vblank gives this

1941 frames in 5.0 seconds = 388.164 FPS

a little update that could help some, in my ati card i had to left system without the fix posted here but i tried xrender in kde desktop effects and some works including transparency

[cage47]

Nope. This is no good. I've done all the tests. My 3d is now cheesed. If I leave my system and my gl screensavers come up, all kinds of nastiness happens. It ranges from graphics going totally wonky (when I get out of the screensaver windows jump all over the place, menus pop up and disappear at a whim and can't click on anything) to the system totally hanging with a messed up screen visible. So tonight gonna do a clean install of 2011.6. If this doesn't fix it I'm going to reinstall 2010.12 and pin xorg and update everything else. If that doesn't work.......welllllll, we'll see.

[cage47]

I've done all this. And a clean reinstall of PCLOS 2011.6. Still no go. I have things working at least. But performance is shot. I'm now only getting 112fps at best. Not acceptable. Going to have to reinstall 2010.12 and update all except xorg.

[T6]

can that be done safely?

[cage47]

Dunno. On my second attempt. I tried once and it still bogged down. This time I've only so far updated KDE and it's running fine. Taking it little by little to see what specifically is making the changes. I think it might be the drakxtools. But not sure. I know it SHOULDN'T be done like this. But I really want to keep the new system running with the old system settings. If it comes to it I'll just download the full monty dvd. But no matter what I do the 2011 release is not acceptable on my system.

[Hootiegibbon]

Dunno. On my second attempt. I tried once and it still bogged down. This time I've only so far updated KDE and it's running fine. Taking it little by little to see what specifically is making the changes. I think it might be the drakxtools. But not sure. I know it SHOULDN'T be done like this. But I really want to keep the new system running with the old system settings. If it comes to it I'll just download the full monty dvd. But no matter what I do the 2011 release is not acceptable on my system.

cage47,

Selective updating will mess up your system.-- fact - PCLinuxOS is a rolling meta distribution - accept it or perhaps its not the choice for you.

how are you measuring the fps?  if its GLX gears then it SHOULD match the framerate of your monitor/display (its not a good measurement on judging card performance.

Jase

[cage47]

I know about PCLOS's rolling release. And so far I've tried 4 times with no luck. It just won't work. I can get the old system (2010.12) reinstalled, but when I go to install all my other programs they pull stuff from the new files and it cheeses up the install. Right now I'm downloading the 2011.4 full monty dvd to see if that helps. It is basically a result of the kernel modules from what I can tell. I have really loved coming back to PCLOS and don't want to face a "it's not right for you" as it has really made a difference. But if I can't get my performance back this might be a game stopper for me. Dunno what I'll do next. But waiting for Full Monty to finish. Running off a Mepis 11 dvd now.

[T6]

you are refusing to accept a problem and accept the solutions given

you want to use the system in a way that will break it surely

we can't help you anymore

decide to change that ati card or find a distro that is using a older kernel and a older xorg for a little longer until you decide to change that video card

your posts complaining are basically hijacking this post created by a forum member that wants to help but can't help everyone

what i say is, decide

[cage47]

Maybe some of us have other priorities other than replacing hardware at the drop of a hat. I was trying to keep up with this excellent distro. And it wasn't the distro as more the kernel level that I have an issue with. But the way things are wrapped up It just won't work on my machine as is. And I can't revert back to 2010. Excuse me for wanting to put my input on an issue I think SOMEONE might want to hear about. But since it's not wanted then count me out. Really thought our community had moved past this petiness of criticizing someone who doesn't agree with the crowd. And since this thread was titled "Fix for Older ATI cards" and those fixes did not work on my machine, even following them to the letter, I figured this was relevant input. not hijacking.

[T6]

"Maybe some of us have other priorities other than replacing hardware at the drop of a hat"

you already expressed that idea, we got it

"Really thought our community had moved past this petiness of criticizing someone who doesn't agree with the crowd"

we already discussed the decision of amd to put to rest ati cards older than r300 along time ago, years in fact

xorg is doing basically the same abandoning old hardware

a fix can be found but you already discovered that doesn't work perfectly

"And since this thread was titled "Fix for Older ATI cards" and those fixes did not work on my machine, even following them to the letter, I figured this was relevant input. not hijacking."

sorry but it looks like all you do is negative, everything you report is how you broke something, something we told you not to do it because it was going to break the system

i ask again, what have you decided?

[AndrzejL]

cage47 I own 5 laptops. 3 of them are running old ati chips which failed miserably 3d-wise after upgrade. Have I whined and demanded a fix? No I went to the #xorg channel and asked a lot of questions. I was told to go to #ati channel and from there they pointed me to the #radeon channel at irc.freenode.net. I asked for help there. Why? Because I cannot afford to change 3 out of 5 laptops just like that. I cannot afford even half of a new laptop. All the machines I own are freebies or supercheapos. It took me a long time to get my cards sorted. Then I double tested it and posted a solution. Try doing the same. It gave me great deal of satisfaction when I was sure that all my machines will continue to work fine and that I can share the solution with other PCLinuxOSers.

Regards.

Andy

[Hootiegibbon]

Maybe some of us have other priorities other than replacing hardware at the drop of a hat. I was trying to keep up with this excellent distro. And it wasn't the distro as more the kernel level that I have an issue with. But the way things are wrapped up It just won't work on my machine as is. And I can't revert back to 2010. Excuse me for wanting to put my input on an issue I think SOMEONE might want to hear about. But since it's not wanted then count me out. Really thought our community had moved past this petiness of criticizing someone who doesn't agree with the crowd. And since this thread was titled "Fix for Older ATI cards" and those fixes did not work on my machine, even following them to the letter, I figured this was relevant input. not hijacking.

could you please start a new topic in the appropriate area

use pastebin to show the result of dmesg and glxinfo and link them to the new topic

also show the result of lspci |grep -i vga

and recap on the issue you face

jase

[AndrzejL]

I have reinstalled one of my ati machines with 2011.6 final iso. Xorg works great. KDE4 works and looks sweet but since I want to use this machine as a mobile lappy and I want to save the battery as much as I can I have installed task-lxde on top of the kde4 installation. Just for the heck of it I have also installed compiz and drak3d. My fix allows me to run compiz and have lxde with wobbly windows and cube desktop effect.

Edit: KDE + Compiz are running verrry smooth. Wobbly windows and desktop cube... all works really well. CPU usage is slightly higher then on the LXDE but to be honest - this is awesome.

Just an addition to the info posted before.

It's a very old laptop fitted with 16 MB radeon card... 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY

If this machine can run 3D so smoothly... I rest my case.

Regards.

Andy