Radeon x1300 + SecondLife_i686_1_18_1_2 Slow

Puzzled

Is this cos we run linux and ATI doesn't care? tried their driver (ati.com blah blah) but no improvement

The ATI chipset and the x1300 seem OK in windoze but with opensuse 10.2 (stock, no mods) it just blows chunks. Whole seconds to type a character or turn a degree or so.

Anyone else out there with a ATI chipset, x1300 AGP card?

Any advice?

Anything?

Try turning off VBO available inthe graphics preferences. Also type fglrxinfo to double check that you are indeed using fglrx and not the default mesa library.

um... should it look like this?

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1300 / X1550 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6458 (8.36.5)

By the way, VBO is indeed disabled.

Thanks for your help and interest so far!

mmm, that's correct. Shows you are using the ati fglrx driver. Can you run glrxgears and output a few of the lines. You should get something like this.

10859 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2171.790 FPS
10823 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2164.538 FPS
10824 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2164.793 FPS

More like:

Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
964 frames in 5.0 seconds = 192.800 FPS
1224 frames in 5.0 seconds = 244.800 FPS
1204 frames in 5.0 seconds = 240.800 FPS

Yeah - this is obviously the symptom... Any ideas as to the root cause? I never been this deep before.

[thinks fond thoughts of sending ATI card to the crusher]

I had a Radeon Mobility x1300 (shared RAM, 64 main 64 dedicated), and it got a constant 5 FPS no matter where I was.

From the results I would say that DRI is not being properly loaded. I would suggest, to rule out the possibility that its an installation problem to follow this tutorial here. It's for 10.1 but the principle is the same. Just make the appropriate version number change. i.e 10.2

http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/05/12/suse-101-ati-drivers-installation/

While you mentioned using the ATI driver I would recommend updating to the latest 8.39.4 build currently on their site.

http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

i had the ati x1300 agp card with opensuse 10.2, but opensuse HATES ati xseries cards with a passion. i had to break down and buy an nvidia. better in the long run, less problems, better support.
did you follow the instructions from the opensuse.org website? none of them worked for me, not even the ati installation instructions. i always got the black screen of death.
from what i understand dell is putting pressure on ati to get them to make better drivers, but that may be a long way off before they release any.

my advice, switch to nvidia geforce, it'll save you the migraines, trust me, i know >_<

People, please check the Help/About in SL and see what the OpenGL driver/vender is being detected.
As I posted in /263/63/202227/1.html my SL detects my ATI driver as generic Mesa Indirect, so it doesnt actually try to use any OpenGL acceleration.

Tupac, what does your help/about show about OpenGL/Graphics Vendor?

Seems to be a generic Linux issue... I first tried FC7, Ubuntu FeistyFawn before returning to opensuse and bugging you good people.

ATI works well with Windows - I think - but I have no intentions of going there. Yes, perhaps i should cease to beat my head against this brick wall and get a nice decent NV card instead.

Any one you'd recommend?

And thanks to all for the great suggestions and your support!

This is what it is...

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+
Memory: 1011 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.18.8-0.5-default #1 SMP Fri Jun 22 12:17:53 UTC 2007 i686
Graphics Card Vendor: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
Graphics Card: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL Version: 1.4 (1.5 Mesa 6.5.1)
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)


I'll go check your post...

Thanks!

i bought the geforce 7950 gt 512mb, it's really fast and well supported.

Dell just announced that it would like to start selling linux computers with ATI cards. Problem they have at a moment is that ATI drivers are too lousy to do that and thus they can only use nVidia in linux computers.

If Dell cannot get things to run properly with linux + ATI, how could you?

I've had little problems with my ati card and Ubuntu/opensuse/fedora. Although granted the performance difference between the windows and linux drivers are noticeable. Ubuntu has the ability itself to install the ATI drivers and set them up for you via the Restricted Drivers menu option making installation a breeze. Extract of my xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 (PCIE)]"
Driver "fglrx"
Busid "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "EnablePrivateBackZ" "no"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "agplock=0"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "locked-userpages=0"
Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "UseFastTLS" "0"
Option "ForceGenericCPU" "off"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes"
Option "no_accel" "no"
Option "no_dri" "no
Option "Capabilities" "0x00000000"
Option "CapabilitiesEx" "0x00000000"
Option "DynamicClocks" "on"
Option "mtrr" "on"
Option "CenterMode" "off"
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "off"
Option "Stereo" "off"
Option "StereoSyncEnable" "1"
Option "FSAAEnable" "no"
Option "FSAAScale" "1"
Option "FSAADisableGamma" "no"
Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "no"
Option "FSAAMSPosX0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX5" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY5" "0.000000"
Option "DesktopSetup" "Single"
Option "ScreenOverlap" "0"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "BackingStore" "on"
EndSection

Warning though, some of these options don't work to well with all ATI cards.

Ok, Tupac, you can drop all the speculation. It's not your ATI configs or anything.
ATI drivers were very hard to setup before AMD came in, now they're getting better and better.
Thing is the SL linux client is misdetecting the OpenGL Vendor/Driver and therefore disabling any hardware acceleration we might have.

How do we get a developer's attention on this?

We light a fire under his or her ass!

I bit the bullet. Went and ordered a $400 nvidia card.

Anyone want a (almost new) ati x1300? That is - before I find me a real linden and introduce them to the card inserted sideways! Hm! You know - that mental image almost makes me feel better?

By the way - SL to one side, the ATI card is gorgeous! Lovely crisp graphics, and the driver install is a breeze - just add http://www2.ati.com/suse/10.2/ to the yast/zypper install sources and remember to remove the crappy ones suse is shipped with first.

Thanks to you all ever so much. I *really* appreciate your time and comments.

Guess what?

The real trouble was not with slviewer or the ATI drivers or OpneGL or MESA. It was the following in the xorg.conf:

Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0660
EndSection

Change the mode to 0666 and happiness, light, joy and SL unbounded!

I have a similar problem. The execution is very slow and the FPS does not change if the size of the window is significantly smaller.

fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6747 (8.40.4)

About Second Life...
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz
Memory: 1012 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600
OpenGL Version: 2.0.6747 (8.40.4)
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/18346 (0.0%)
Viewer Digest: 43df0268-55b0-d259-b7d6-12c8061926b2

At the moment I have about 9 FPS. Second Life is executed in a window. The size of the window does not change the FPS.
Maximized window: 9.1 FPS
Small window (about a quarter of the maximized): 9.7 FPS

If I execute other OpenGL applications, I get a significant difference.

fgl_glxgears:
Maximized window: 1480 frames in 5.0 seconds = 296.000 FPS
Small window: 3689 frames in 5.0 seconds = 737.800 FPS

0666 is already set on my laptop.

Sometime but not always the following error occurs:
fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrAllocMem failed!!
Either it does not occur or the whole terminal is filled with such error messages. If the message occurs the performance is unacceptable. I can't reproduce this, it happens or not.

I have pretty much the same reactions from a Radeon 9250 Graphics Card a bit doggy after a while and slows down then i exit..... like it takes it nearly 5 minutes to go doggy sometimes 10.... but yes its nearly the same reasons.

With the Radeon 9250, are you using the proprietary or the open source drivers? You can get pretty good performance out of a Radeon 9250 with the open source drivers, and it's quite stable too. Give that a try.

fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrAllocMem failed!!

Yes I've seen those in my testings... Usually when trying to OVER do it.

That brings me to a question: what exactly does the memory selection option in the Graphics Preferences expect? Should it be the card's REAL memory? Should it be the whole Hypermemory that can be used (in my case up to 640MB, but only 64MB is really in the memory).
How should this affect performance? I have NOT "felt" any FPS diference using any of the options... do they actually exist in the linux SL client?