slow draw on some 2D apps and dynamic clocks not working properly

[Raphaela]

Just a thought you may wish to check the accuracy of the temp sensors. Check them as SOON as possible after system startup after the system has been turned off for at least 3 hours. From my expierience if the sensors are accurate the readings will be never more than 3 or 4 degrees above ambient. Note: I do NOT use a graphical startup, the system boots to a shell from there I run "startx". So in my case the system has done little work on startup.

Only on one board have I found the temp sensors inaccurate though.

Blacksmith

When the system starts, in around 1~2 minutes on the virtual terminal, the temps jumps to 65~70?. There are no power save without X running. With X running and power save on, if I don't change workspace or abuse of xterm, the temperature stays around 1~3? over the Windows idling temps (40~46?), but just after change of workspace it jumps to 50~60, and need to wait about 20 seconds without doing anything to return to 40~46?.

[Blacksmith]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm, Just checked out the performance of an XFX 5870, test report shows it is a warm running card. Reported temp on load being 82 C. My gigabyte runs quite a bit lower than that. What is the case air flow like and what case is the system in. A good rule of thumb here is if the case is warm on the outside you are in trouble, ie if you place your hand on top of a case it should NOT be warm to the touch, ever.

As for Catalyst 11.1 just swapped my 5870 for my 4870 results exactly the same slow drawing rate so it appears 11.1 is a signifcant step backwards.as the 4870 was performing OK with 10.9.

Slightly depressing this I may say. The 5870 being an excellent card under windows.

[Raphaela]

There's a way to force the clocks to stay at 157/300? These clocks changes are really annoying.

[Blacksmith]

That would be a good question as I have no idea. The clocks mentioned are set by the "system" and I have not bothered the see if they are changing or can be changed. The systems perfomance in 3d is no problem (from memory, I have not tried 3d in a while as I am currently running the OS driver).

With the current FGLRX the systems performance appears to be identical with both the 4870 and the 5870, ie they are both drawing 2D slow. Cannot go back to the previous driver version with working 4870 2D acceleration (Catalyst 10.9) as this will no longer compile with the 2.6.37 kernel. The motherboard requires the latter kernel for the on board sound to work). Going to try the 5870 again as there appears to be little to pick from them (in Linux) and the 5870 is very good under windows, mind you the 4870 is no slouch either.

Note: all this musical chairs with video cards is the courtesy of an NVidia GTX 460 which I have. The performance of this is PATHETIC with Microsoft train simulator on WindowsXP. So I will have to use the 4870 in my MSTS machine which means I must use the 5870.

[Kano]

Of course you can go back to that older fglrx release when you use -v 10-9 option ot my fglrx script (in case of D/U).

[Raphaela]

Installed the 11.2 today, nothing changed. What should I do ... ?

[Blacksmith]

Just a question do you REALLY require good 3D support at the moment if not you MAY consider giving the open source driver a go. Now I have as yet not tried this on my 5870 but both my 3870 and 4870 work great on it, in 2D the driver being lightning fast. This driver also works completely OK without an xorg.conf (well when I have tried it it has).

[Raphaela]

Just a question do you REALLY require good 3D support at the moment if not you MAY consider giving the open source driver a go. Now I have as yet not tried this on my 5870 but both my 3870 and 4870 work great on it, in 2D the driver being lightning fast. This driver also works completely OK without an xorg.conf (well when I have tried it it has).

Is there a way to read temperature, and, is there a good powersaving in these drivers?

[BlackStar]

Is there a way to read temperature, and, is there a good powersaving in these drivers?

Temperatures are available directly in lm-sensors ("sudo sensors-detect" to setup; "sensors" to run).

As for powersaving, you can force clocks to low/med/high or dynamic (depending on load). Worth a try.

[Raphaela]

After two or three months, I'm back with some news.

A few days ago, I've saw that Slackware 13.37 have been released, and it's coming with some package versions that I was thinking to test, like Mesa-7.9.2, xf86-video-ati-6.14.1, some other XORG-7.6 release packages, and, linux-2.6.37. So, I've installed here and the results were good. The basics that I was needing, were working.

I can force the clocks to low. Even without X running (KMS);
mplayer xv output is fast and without tearing;
fast desktop;
fast xterm;
I can check the temps with lm_sensors, and the clocks via kernel debugfs;

sensors output:

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:       +48.0?C

cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info:

default engine clock: 850000 kHz
current engine clock: 156990 kHz
default memory clock: 1200000 kHz
current memory clock: 300000 kHz
voltage: 950 mV
PCIE lanes: 16

So, I've recompiled my XORG, Mesa and Kernel. Now, these things are working on my homebrew system.

Some other problems occurred, and, some games like Doom 3, Penumbra and wine games, are not working flawlessly. But, since the support for 5xxx series still in the beggining, it's only matter of time to developers correct them. I'll wait for new XORG release to update everything again, now I'm officially with the open source drivers.

The only annoying problem now is that some fonts are strange, like when you turn on Sub-Pixel effect. They are with slightly colored border, and after try many things, I haven't find the solution. It would be great if someone knows how to change this.

I've tried to put 10-no-sub-pixel.conf on fontconfig, and Option "SubPixelOrder" "none" on xorg.conf. The fontconfig solved the most part of the fonts, but there are still ones with problem.

And thanks for everything.