radeon driver: google earth not accelerated

[Roland Scheidegger]

On 16.05.2008 23:50, Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Jethro Tull <heavytull at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>  my Gcard is an ATI Mobility radeon X300; I'm using the Open source radeon
>> driver compiled for Xorg 1.4.0.90, module version = 4.3.0.
>>
>> I don't understand why google earth is still so slow. this driver is claimed
>> to provide full 3D acceleration. glxinfo actually confirms that the direct
>> rendering is on.
>>
>> Some 3D screen savers are actually very fast, and do not eat the CPU
>> resources. but google earth pushes the CPU to 100% load.
> 
> googleearth uses smooth lines extensively what are not accelerated in
> the r300 driver at the moment.  You can set the
> disable_lowimpact_fallbacks driconf option to disable the fallbacks
> which are what are causing the performance issues.

As a side note, I'm not sure it really uses smooth lines "extensively".
For all I know, it could simply enable line smoothing without drawing a
single line ever and the driver would still use a software fallback for
everything drawn... (though yes I'm pretty sure it draws some lines -
I've no idea if googleearth will disable line smoothing when not drawing
lines, but probably not - why should it?)

Roland