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Huge performance problem with r300 and KWin on openSUSE

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  • #11
    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.

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    • #12
      There might be some kwin plugin that is not well accelerated. You might try disabling some of the plugins to see if that helps.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by RealNC View Post
        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:



        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.

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        • #14
          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.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by 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.
            You mean those?


            * 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.

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            • #16
              Flash acceleration

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



              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. ]

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              • #17
                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.

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                • #18
                  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.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by devius View Post
                    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.

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                    • #20
                      Crap card crap performance

                      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.
                      Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety,deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
                      Ben Franklin 1755

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