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Section "Device" Identifier "Card0" Driver "radeon" Option "DPMS" "true" ## Use EXA (faster) or XAA (merely fast) Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" ## For PCIe. Use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook. Option "AccelDFS" "1" ## Increases 3D performance substantially ## possibly in XAA mode only Option "EnablePageFlip" ## 0 - 64 MB of gart (system) memory used. ## Wrongly defaults to 8MB sometimes, so check logs. #Option "GARTSize" "64" ## Increases 3D performance substantially, supposedly Option "ColorTiling" "1" Option "DynamicClocks" "on" EndSection
A quick run of glxgears shows that it's still reporting about 5500 FPS, same as with xf86-video-ati 6.9. (Edit: with mesa-7.3_rc2, it's now 5700 FPS, about 150 FPS faster.)
The last time I tried UT2004 with the radeon driver, I had to turn all settings down to minimum. There was still a fair amount of occasional slowdown in online matches. The card wasn't as good as my nVidia 7600GT running with the proprietary nvidia driver. Too bad -- the X1950 has at least twice the specs of the nVidia card, yet the FOSS drivers can't seem to fully utilize the hardware.
I fired up UT2004 again, and on servers with few to no players, I was able to play at almost the same settings. I usually play with max resolution and everything else at max on the nVidia card. I just had to turn off a few of the highest settings and reduce the detail distance for my X1950. Works for mostly empty maps. Maps full of players reduced the game to a 9FPS stutter-fest. Completely unworkable, so I'll have to do more tweaking.
More disturbing is that the new driver hard-locks my box sometimes! If I pull up the in-game menu with Escape, sometimes that hardlocks the box. The screen gets filled with graphical corruption -- triangles, colors, lines -- and doesn't respond.
I can't SSH into the box, so I have to hit the reset button. Not good.
Overall, the new driver is okay -- a bit faster for 2D work than even 6.9, and even a bit faster for 3D. But it's much, much more unstable for 3D usage. Kind of a mixed bag, I'm sorry to say.
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