Re: Another "What Motherboard Should I Buy" question

Darren Salt <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I demand that Anton Ertl may or may not have written...

Darren Salt <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I demand that Anton Ertl may or may not have written...
[snip]
My laptop (iBook G4 with Mobile Radeon 9200) is much weaker than your
box, and it gets 2185fps with a few tweaks in the options (and IIRC
1200fps without any tweaks).

Sounds interesting... what tweaks? (Limitation: the display consists of
two monitors, total width 2304 pixels.)

In the Device section of the xorg.conf file:

Option "GARTSize" "16" #up to 64 on other systems

Hmm. How does this differ from the AGPSize option? Just an alias? (I have
that set to 128; memory says that the BIOS has the same setting, and the card
is claimed to have 128MB on-board.)

I have no idea. I have never heard of AGPSize, and neither option is
documented in radeon(4) or Xorg.conf(5).

Option "ColorTiling" "on"

On by default, according to Xorg.0.log, but disabled due to the total display
width being greater than 2048 pixels.

Yes, some options are on by default. Actually only the following is
really needed:

Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"

Enabled.

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

I remember EXA working well, then not working well after an upgrade
(unfortunately, I'm not certain exactly which upgrade, but I suspect
something in X.org 6.9->7.1). Which is unfortunate, because it made xfwm4's
compositing work well.

I just played around with various combinations of all these options,
and this combination turned out to be best for IIRC UT2004
performance.

Option "AGPMode" "4"

Both board and card support 8x. Is there a good reason for selecting 4x
despite this?

8x made no difference in the benchmarks I ran (UT2004 and glxgears),
and my guess is that 4x is safer (although probably not
significantly).

In addition, on the command line:
export hyperz=true #only affects R200 driver

That does make a noticeable difference, but not for glxgears :-)

On the Athlon 64 box with a Radeon 9250 it sped up glxgears from IIRC
2200fps to 3500fps; it also helped on the iBook, but I don't remember
the exact values. It doesn't make a difference to UT2004.

OTOH, I'm considering a 9550; ideally, I'd find something a bit better, but
they seem rather thin on the ground :-\

The Radeon X850XT AGP is still available, and not too expensive (~EUR
120,-). Alternatively, a little less powerful and quite a bit
cheaper (and not much more expensive than a 9550): X800GTO (EUR 72,-).

If you go for the 9550, for some applications (like UT2004) you should
get a version with a 128-bit memory interface and 256MB RAM.

- 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
.