On Sun, 2007-12-23 at 17:51 -0800, Dave Stevens wrote: > Hi, > > I have a F7 box using an ATI 1600 board. I am happy with the board but > confused about drivers. When I set up F7 I added Livna as a repository. I > currently have the ATI catalyst 8.42.3 driver. I would like to be able to use > the hardware on the video card to get smooth graphics in normal desktop use. > > When F7 was first set up the default desktop graphics stank. No fancy stuff, > either, just moving and resizing windows routinely did not give smooth > motion. Scrolling text worked better, but not what I hoped. I basically think > a modern computer (a dual core opteron with 2G RAM) should be able to do > better than a 386 DOS box and maybe it did but it was a close thing. > > Using the instructions at http://www.fedorafaq.org/f7/#radeon I made some > headway. I don't know any good simple test suite for measuring graphics > capability in Fedora, so for lack of some better metric I used glxgears to > see how many frames I'd get. Well, after initial install I got about 600 fps. > Then I used the ATI driver and got about 5000 fps. The subjective view more > or less corresponds to what you'd expect from this ratio. I have not been > able to enable desktop effects. I don't know why, when I click on the > deceptively labelled button that says, "enable desktop effects" what I get > instead is a lot of screen wiggling and a highly informative error message > that says, "desktop effects could not be enabled." True no doubt, but less > useful than I would have wished. > > Yesterday I downloaded and burned an iso of mandriva 2008 one (a live cd), > just to see. After figuring out that the terminal was called Konsole I ran > glxgears and got a figure of about 10,000 fps. The desktop came up with > desktop effects enabled by default and everything was pretty smooth. > > I have in the past tried quite hard to figure out what is the best free driver > setup to use and to actually install and use one. But the performance of what > I could achieve was pathetic and the process was painful. Do people have > opinions about > > 1 a good simple test of graphics capabilities for a Fedora install? > 2 the likelihood that Fedora will have comparable performance to Mandriva (or > any other similar distribution) any time soon? > 3 Is the ATI disclosure of their software internals going to result in the > RadeonHD driver getting better? or when? ---- 1. I don't know...other than glxgears that you already know about. 2. It should have that now 3. I am unclear about your references. Xorg includes their own 'radeon' driver which is not accelerated and not 3d. I struggled with F8's xorg version of the radeon driver but it seemed to work reasonably well on F7 but perhaps there was an update in F7 that brought it on a par with F8. ATi released their closed source, binary only driver which is what you are referring to it appears but only they have control over that. I would believe that you could use the same driver whether you were using Mandriva, Fedora or whatever so it seems unlikely that there should be any performance difference between distributions. You may find it useful to examine the xorg.conf file in both setups to see what the differences might be. nVidia has definitely spent more energy on Linux drivers and sooner on Linux than has ATi so they seem to lag behind. One would expect that as they live up to previously unfulfilled commitments to integration with the open source world that their drivers will improve. Craig
