Poor MythTV (XVideo, OpenGL) performance with E-350 Zacate / Radeon HD 6310

I am a long time Linux/Nvidia user and have been enjoying vdpau on my desktop for years :) However i have recently build a HTPC with a Asus E35M1-M PRO mainboard featuring a AMD E-350 APU (1,6 GHz dual core CPU and Radeon HD 6310 graphics card. Having heard that the catalyst driver has catched up to nvidia in recent days, i thougt i'd give AMD a try.

I am running a current Arch Linux with MythTV 0.24.1 and the proprietary catalyst driver from AUR. My window manager is fluxbox and i don't use composite 3D-desktop stuff or whatever it's called currently. Catalyst seems to run the way it's supposed to run, direct rendering is working.

Unfortunately even the standard 720x576 MPEG2 DVB-C doesn't run smooth and seems to be lagging behind and loosing frames (plus the ATI standard tearing :rolleyes:). This is the case for XVideo and OpenGL. XVmC doesn't work and VDPAU obviously does neither. The cpu load is at roughly 70-80% on both cores (< 10% on nvidia even without VDPAU!!!).

I am suspecting i am missing some essential "ATI magic" in xorg.conf or with ati-config to get XV to work in a acceptable way. Does anybody have some pointers?

After evenings full of struggle messing around with xorg.conf, aticonfig and amdcccle i went back to my old Asus M3N78-VM with nvidia graphics. I tried everything out of the Arch Linux forum, wiki and several pages of those ever present Ubuntu hits from google, but i wasn't able to fix the sluggish and high CPU load playback even of "SD" video.

On nvidia it's a simple

Code:

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Driver        "nvidia"

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in xorg.conf and everything works without any further hassle...

Perhaps i'll give a ATI/AMD GPU another try in a few years, but i really doubt it will be any better.

When using ATI it's a little awkward at times because the initial setup can be a little bit of trouble. The first step is to confirm the driver is working properly, and to do that you need to run this command from xorg:

Code:

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fglrxinfo

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if this is working it should output something similar to this: (The sample is for an old system, but current systems have similar outputs )

Code:

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display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1600 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7415 Release

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This should be enough to confirm that the system has OpenGL Information, however if you want to verify more in depth, use the command "glxinfo"

Now the next step is easy enough... Configure everything to use OpenGL for rendering ( this should provide performance boosts).

However, the only other suggestion is to look into installing the xvba driver for vaapi.

I also forgot to ask another pertinent question. What version of FGLRX are you trying to install? Sometimes the performance is horrible when the driver is allowed on new systems.

Two posts to rant about about proprietary ati drivers and stop.

Congrats.