Horrid (or no) performance with AMD HD4850.

[Exospaciac]

No matter what I do, I get awful performance with the fglrx driver using Catalyst 8.7. I get unbearable system slowdowns whenever I try to move or resize a window. I also get about 150fps in glxgears.

I tried downloading Catalyst 8.8, but I didn't even get a display; my system would freeze as soon as X attempted to start and I had to change my xorg.conf from a livecd.

Does anyone have any tips as to how I can improve performance? I get better performance using the VESA driver than anything else.

And yes I have tried the xf86 drivers and neither worked at all.

My system:
Intel E7200 @ 3.4GHz
Diamond HD4850
ASUS P5N-E
OCZ StealthXStream 600w
2x1GB OCZ Platinum Rev. 2 DDR2 800

[rbmorse]

I'd start by killing the overclock and see if the video card straightens up.

[Exospaciac]

Putting the processor back at stock did nothing.
I noticed that when I do have 8.8 installed, when it tries to load X my card's fan is at 100% usage. I dunno if that means anything, but I thought it was weird.

[MU_Engineer]

No matter what I do, I get awful performance with the fglrx driver using Catalyst 8.7. I get unbearable system slowdowns whenever I try to move or resize a window. I also get about 150fps in glxgears.

I tried downloading Catalyst 8.8, but I didn't even get a display; my system would freeze as soon as X attempted to start and I had to change my xorg.conf from a livecd.

Does anyone have any tips as to how I can improve performance? I get better performance using the VESA driver than anything else.

And yes I have tried the xf86 drivers and neither worked at all.

My system:
Intel E7200 @ 3.4GHz
Diamond HD4850
ASUS P5N-E
OCZ StealthXStream 600w
2x1GB OCZ Platinum Rev. 2 DDR2 800

Sounds like direct rendering isn't working. What does "glxinfo | grep render" tell you?

[Exospaciac]

Direct rendering doesn't work with 8.7

direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

Also, this is what happens when I try to boot with Catalyst 8.8:
http://i37.tinypic.com/15f5d13.jpg