Re: Another "What Motherboard Should I Buy" question

Mark Adams <mark9117@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Anton Ertl wrote:
Mark Adams <mark9117@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
# glxinfo
....
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R200 20060327 AGP 1x x86/MMX/SSE2 TCL

One thing I note is that I used the following version of Mesa DRI R200
in my experiments with the 9250: 20060602 (what comes with Debian Etch).

Now, I'd love to solve all this with a stick of RAM and/or a $150-ish
video card, but I'm not sure how realistic that is -- nobody I've had
this discussion with in Usenet or on the Mandriva support boards has any
idea why rendering is so slow on this desktop.

The most likely culprits just seem to be the ATI drivers. What is your
sense about that?

I also think it's a software problem, either the version you use, or
some configuration problem.

I have tried seven different Radeon "cards" on three systems, all with
Debian Etch and the free "radeon" driver, and on all of them hardware
3D acceleration worked and I got glxgears frame rates in the
thousands:

Laptop: Mobile Radeon 9200
AGP system (Athlon 64): 9250, 9600, 9600XT
PCIe system (Core 2 Duo): X550, X800GTO, X850XT

I also did some experiments with some of the PCIe system
configurations with some Gentoo Live CD, a Sabayon Live CD, and with
the Knoppix 5.2 DVD included in c't 7/07, and hardware 3D worked
whenever I tried it (and Beryl on the Knoppix DVD worked nicely after
fixing the problem below).

Probably not helpful for you, but maybe interesting to others: One
invariant in these experiments was that, whenever the distribution
generated an xorg.conf file with 'Driver "ati"', X did not work, and
that problem could be fixed by changing that to 'Driver "radeon"';
IIRC with the Knoppix DVD X died with the "ati" setting, so Knoppix
fell back to using the totally unaccelerated "vesa" driver; using
"radeon" fixed that, too.

Anyway, if the Mandriva people feel that they have problems with the
Radeon driver, maybe the Radeon driver distributed with Mandriva is
flawed. Or maybe the people there know as little what the problem is
as I do, and a few of those then point somewhere (whereas the wiser
ones shut up).

One thing you could try is to see if the Knoppix 5.2 DVD works with
Beryl on your hardware (if you can get it; this version is not
available for download, and basically only available with c't 7/07:-().
Interestingly, <http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix52-en.html>
says:

|The most successful candidates with DRI and transparency in our tests
|were "older" ATI cards (i.e. Radeon Mobility) and Intel onboard
|graphics chipsets. With these cards, many features of beryl worked
|flawlessly and stable.

A Radeon 9250 sounds like an ideal card.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
.

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