Terrible Compiz performance with radeon or fglrx + Radeon HD 4500

[David Sanders <dsuzukisanders@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

I've just replaced my old Dell Studio 1735 with a newer Dell Studio
1745. This comes with a Radeon HD 4500, and I'm having problems with
both "radeon" and "fglrx" drivers. Now using Debian Testing, which is
up-to-date.

Using "radeon" I get perfectly adequate Compiz performance (benchmarks
at over 100fps), and fairly acceptable OpenGL generally, but movie
playback is terrible - skipped frames etc on just a normal DivX file,
and HD video is impossibly bad. This is without an xorg.conf, for
obvious reasons.

Using "fglrx" I get terrible Compiz performance (benchmarking around
20fps), terrible movie performance, but excellent general OpenGL
performance - around 200fps in ArmagetronAD - which is what I would
hope to expect! This was using an xorg.conf created by `aticonfig
--initial`.

Any pointers? I've really had no joy at all from forum searching.


Thanks

David