Huge performance problem with r300 and KWin on openSUSE

[AndrewR]

Off-topic here, but this problem keep surfacing..

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguinswf/20..._problems.html

By mike russell - 1:09 PM on January 27, 2010

Why can’t flash player do its RGB-YUV on the GPU with a shader (I have done this, its quite easy) and its blending on the GPU? 2 OpenGL textures? Surely most of flash should be GPU accelerated? [ It's YUV to RGB conversion, and we also need the data back from the GPU's memory so we can do other stuff with it. -Mike M. ]

[agd5f]

First you need to make sure the flash plugin is even attempting to use the gpu. Last I heard it does not attempt to unless it detects the binary drivers. Then once you confirm that it is using the gpu, if it's not performing well, profile it with something like sysprof to find out why it's slow.

[Qaridarium]

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

wow thank you very much i search that information.

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

why my agp system with an hd4650+catalyst works very well with that feature?

[devius]

Unless it's a relatively powerful gpu (HD4500+), kwin is going to suck hard on radeons if you have compositing active. Catalyst or OSS drivers doesn't matter. Your best choice is to change the window manager to compiz. Compiz used to run very smoothly a few years ago on an Athlon XP 2400+ and Radeon 9500pro on Fedora 8 using the OSS drivers. Either that or just don't use compositing. Kwin's 2D performance is excellent last time I checked.

[bwat47]

Unless it's a relatively powerful gpu (HD4500+), kwin is going to suck hard on radeons if you have compositing active. Catalyst or OSS drivers doesn't matter. Your best choice is to change the window manager to compiz. Compiz used to run very smoothly a few years ago on an Athlon XP 2400+ and Radeon 9500pro on Fedora 8 using the OSS drivers. Either that or just don't use compositing. Kwin's 2D performance is excellent last time I checked.

Yeah this has definitely been my experience.

My mobility radeon isn't super powerful, but it should be more than enough for any fancy desktop effects (hd2600 with 512mb dedicated gddr3). kwin is basically unusable.

Compiz is kinda crap too but it runs way better (for some reason older versions of compiz like 0.8.4 run far better than recent ones though. Recent versions tend to have laggy/glitchy animations on my card with fglrx). I've been trying gnome 3 today and on the oss drivers mutter actually seems the best for me when it comes to stability and performance. Stuff like resizing windows is way smoother in gnome 3 than in compiz and kwin.

[DarkFoss]

From looking at RealNC's xorg.0.log he's got a Radeon 9550...I also googled and looked at someone else xorg log (arch related ) and his card was loading twice the vram so I'm thinking NC's card is the SE version...slowest crappiest r300 card released..trying to run kde 4.6 ..Good Luck with that. Can you try running XFCE ?

Nasty upgrade(s) too..it's looking for the fglrx module and failing to load it..It also loads the RadeonHD module(unloads later) could at the very least blacklist them. I wonder what the xorg.conf looks like, and if there are still remnants of the ATI proprietary driver still in the system.

Buy an agp 3650 ..probably find one dirt cheap or if the University's IT department can spring for a bit more get the 4650 like Q suggested.

[pingufunkybeat]

FWIW, KWin runs fine here on a PCI-x 4550, and is usable on a PCI 4350, at least without the issues the OP is describing.

So you don't need a really powerful card, even if yours is overpowered.

[Kano]

@RealNC

Why did you install fglrx? Your card is not supported since 9-3 driver. You should clean your system from all fglrx parts. Also get rid of radeonhd, nobody needs that.

[RealNC]

@RealNC

Why did you install fglrx? Your card is not supported since 9-3 driver. You should clean your system from all fglrx parts. Also get rid of radeonhd, nobody needs that.

I didn't. Those are the default entries in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ (there is no stand-alone xorg.conf file).

Anyway, I disabled desktop effects. No one seems to mind.

[chrisr]

First you need to make sure the flash plugin is even attempting to use the gpu. Last I heard it does not attempt to unless it detects the binary drivers.

I'm using the r300g driver with a RV350 GPU, which apparently supports all of the requested OpenGL extensions, and so I created a file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg containing the following line:

OverrideGPUValidation=1

Then I restarted Firefox. I didn't notice any subsequent drop in CPU usage while watching any flash videos, but I did notice a large drop in video quality. In other words, the video started tearing very, very badly.

So now I've set OverrideGPUValidation to zero, and the videos are tear-free again.

For the record, I am using a 2.6.38.5 kernel; KMS and PageFlipping are on, and SwapbuffersWait is "off".