Bug#451511: xserver-xorg-video-ati: The ati driver unexpectedly seems to perform worse than the VESA driver
Helge Hafting wrote:
> Minor severity as the driver works as intended.
>
> I find the low performance odd though. If the accelerator hardware
> is slower than VESA for some operations, then surely the unaccelerated VESA
> way could be used for those things. So it seems to me it doesn't
> need to be slower in any cases.
>
>
> My testcase is to play the game cuyo at levels 2 or 9. (package cuyo)
> This is a tetris-like 2D game. It updated the screen 10 times
> a second, and has a irritating failure mode: If it can't
> finish drawing in 1/10s, then it refuse to take input
> until the drawing queue clears. So it may break very noticeably
> when there is too much animation going on.
>
> Now, perhaps that isn't the best way to design a game, but
> it shows a performance problem.
>
> The ati driver (and the NV driver) easily falls into this trap when
> there is lots of animation in the cuyo window. The game
> becomes quite unplayable.
>
> This simply doesn't happen with the VESA driver. CPU load stays
> below 25% always.
>
> The processor in this case is a 2.4GHz pentium-M,
> lspci shows:
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY
> [Radeon 7000/VE]
>
> Another machine with a pci radeon 9200 SE and a 1.8GHz opteron
> shows the same problem.
>
> A third machine with a 1.8Ghz core duo and a nvidia card has
> this problem too, but of course that is a different package
Can you try with
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
in the Device section of your xorg.conf?
Brice
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