Huge performance problem with r300 and KWin on openSUSE

[pingufunkybeat]

AGP really might be the problem, I remember hearing about issues with these cards.

You could try disabling KMS and using the classic r300c driver in UMS mode, this might work better.

[Qaridarium]

its simple i do have the exact same problem those old systems are AGP systems and the radeon can not handle this... (really)
this systems runs like shit because the AGPx8 do not work correctly.
you get the best result if you upgrade to an AGP hd2000-hd4000 and install the catalyst.

i do some more testing and on my old system the performance improvement is NOT the AGP stuff...

Its the GPU acceleration of the Flash player

i can down-clock the cpu to stock 1,8ghz and the videos run fast without any difference...

the catalyst11.4 in Kubuntu 11.4 +stock flash player accelerate on the GPU...

[Qaridarium]

AGP really might be the problem, I remember hearing about issues with these cards.

You could try disabling KMS and using the classic r300c driver in UMS mode, this might work better.

my found the key on my old system+hd4650 the flash player accelerate on the GPU...

[yotambien]

this systems runs like shit because the AGPx8 do not work correctly.

you get the best result if you upgrade to an AGP hd2000-hd4000 and install the catalyst.

LOL. See? Problem solved!

Next question!

[yotambien]

RealNC, have you tried kwin's xrender acceleration instead of OpenGL? It used to be horrible in the past, but it works very well now. I don't know whether it was driver or kwin changes that made it usable, and I don't know when those changes took place (this is kde 4.6.2 and a fairly recent graphics stack). If you can live with a subset of desktop effects (the most useful and sober ones work) it may be a solution to your problem.

[agd5f]

There might be some kwin plugin that is not well accelerated. You might try disabling some of the plugins to see if that helps.

[Qaridarium]

[...]

hey agd5f can you check out the 5 magic openGL extension left on the supporting list for the Flash/openGL acceleration ???

i think supporting this openGL extensions will bring great flash performance.

i think older system can really benefit from this 5 Extensions.

[marek]

I've installed openSUSE 11.4 on an older machine. It's an Intel P4 2.6GHz CPU with 1.5GB of RAM. Graphics card is a Radeon 9450.

KDE ran like crap. I decided to update everything to their latest versions, so I added the Tumbleweed repo as well as the X.Org repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_11.4

I replaced all packages from those in XOrg. This gave me the Gallium3D version of the radeon driver (r300g).

But... KWin still runs like total crap :-P For example, moving a window with the mouse looks like driving a boat. When you move the mouse, the window needs about 1 or 2 seconds to follow the mouse. It's totally unusable.

Anything I can do?

Radeon 9450? Never heard of it.

It might be the slowest r300 out there. First check you CPU utilization during window movements. If it's like 0%, the GPU is the bottleneck.

[marek]

Another reason it's slow might be that KWin uses heavy shaders even for the simplest things (not sure why, they could make it a lot faster with no difference in visual quality if they tried hard enough). Also a lot of blending (like translucent windows) can bring such a GPU to its knees. Last time I checked their shaders and according to various bug reports, it seemed like their minimum target was r600.

[AndrewR]

hey agd5f can you check out the 5 magic openGL extension left on the supporting list for the Flash/openGL acceleration ???

i think supporting this openGL extensions will bring great flash performance.

i think older system can really benefit from this 5 Extensions.

You mean those?
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguinswf/20...s_the_gpu.html

* GL_ARB_multitexture
* GL_EXT_framebuffer_object
* GL_ARB_shader_objects
* GL_ARB_shading_language_100
* GL_ARB_fragment_shader

At least back in 2008 flash plugin completely disliked free drivers

Also, for fullscreen OpenGL acceleration, the Flash Player requires that the client glx vendor string be something besides “SGI”

But more recent bugreports indicate flash plugin might need fast readback from VRAM, usually AGP systems fail here.