Exa and radeon

[Francesco Biscani]

On Monday 17 April 2006 22:36, Dario Laera wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> after I've installed xorg-server-7.1_RC1 I've tried to run xcompmgr -a
> with exa to see if some things were improved since 7.0, but I still get
> strange result:
>
> http://laera.web.cs.unibo.it/exa.png
>
> I have a mobility 9600 running on a powerbook.
>
> Thanks, Dario.

(I'm CC'ing Eric Anholt, since he's the man for exa)

Hi,

from what I gather following CVS logs you should add an extra option to 
xorg.conf to enjoy the improved exa support in latest xorg:

Option      "MigrationHeuristic" "always"

(in the graphics device section). This option improves the situation on my 
Radeon IGP in some ways, but in others it worsens the performance.

Pro:
- it seems like the exa slowdowns are gone, even when using the transparencies

Con:
- using KDE I get graphics artifacts on the WM's titlebar (I can post a 
screenshot if needed), and when first running xcompmgr it takes a _lot_ of 
time (many seconds) to re-draw the desktop wallpaper and icons. In the 
meanwhile I can move windows smoothly, and that's quite strange. The slowdown 
in drawing the desktop re-appears when switching workspace. The effect seems 
to disappear when running E17 (I don't have gnome, but it seems like this 
problem is peculiar to kdesktop or maybe the Qt toolkit).

So, (that's a question for Eric ;) am I doing something wrong? Can I help in 
debugging this?

HTH,

  Francesco

-- 
Dr. Francesco Biscani
Dipartimento di Astronomia
Università di Padova
biscani at pd.astro.it