I just bought a new motherboard for my wife. The previous board was an Nvidia based AM2 board with a shoddy SATA controller--it was causing nasty crashing in both Linux and WinXP64.
My first thought for the new board was an AMD chipset, and after a little research, I settled on an ASUS M3A78-EM with the 780G chipset. The board has been stable so far, so it solved the main problem.
However, my wife dual boots Debian Unstable and WinXP64, with Debian being her primary OS. She's running a 2.6.30 kernel, recent Xorg (not totally sure, but it is likely the latest), and KDE4.
We've run into one major problem, when running with either the radeon or radeonhd drivers, the IGP has terrible 2D performance. Moving windows, scrolling in firefox and pretty much all animation is choppy and jerky where on the previous setup (NV mobo+7600GS card), everything was totally smooth. For comparison, with latest drivers installed on WinXP64, the 2D performance is excellent, so it isn't the hardware. (Oh, and when I say "terrible", I mean, bad--as in, greater than half a second between screen redraws.)
I tried playing with all the IGP related settings in the BIOS (amount of dedicated VRAM, aperature above/below 4G, &c.), that didn't seem to have any effect (and since XP is fine, I would expect this to be true). I tried tuning the Xorg.conf file--turning glx on and off, compositing, and trying different acceleration modes (EXA and XAA).
We also tried to get fglrx running just for a performance comparison, but the source code for the kernel module layer would not compile (errors in the AMD/ATI supplied header files, which makes me question its compatibility of the rest of the code with the kernel).
Any thoughts on what might help this? Is there a setting I overlooked/don't know about? We would really prefer to run with the open source RadeonHD driver--OSS Linux drivers was a major selling point for us. Or is this a "more testing and development of the drivers needed" kind of deal?
Thanks,
Jeff
My first thought for the new board was an AMD chipset, and after a little research, I settled on an ASUS M3A78-EM with the 780G chipset. The board has been stable so far, so it solved the main problem.
However, my wife dual boots Debian Unstable and WinXP64, with Debian being her primary OS. She's running a 2.6.30 kernel, recent Xorg (not totally sure, but it is likely the latest), and KDE4.
We've run into one major problem, when running with either the radeon or radeonhd drivers, the IGP has terrible 2D performance. Moving windows, scrolling in firefox and pretty much all animation is choppy and jerky where on the previous setup (NV mobo+7600GS card), everything was totally smooth. For comparison, with latest drivers installed on WinXP64, the 2D performance is excellent, so it isn't the hardware. (Oh, and when I say "terrible", I mean, bad--as in, greater than half a second between screen redraws.)
I tried playing with all the IGP related settings in the BIOS (amount of dedicated VRAM, aperature above/below 4G, &c.), that didn't seem to have any effect (and since XP is fine, I would expect this to be true). I tried tuning the Xorg.conf file--turning glx on and off, compositing, and trying different acceleration modes (EXA and XAA).
We also tried to get fglrx running just for a performance comparison, but the source code for the kernel module layer would not compile (errors in the AMD/ATI supplied header files, which makes me question its compatibility of the rest of the code with the kernel).
Any thoughts on what might help this? Is there a setting I overlooked/don't know about? We would really prefer to run with the open source RadeonHD driver--OSS Linux drivers was a major selling point for us. Or is this a "more testing and development of the drivers needed" kind of deal?
Thanks,
Jeff
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