Sluggish 2D with radeon Xpress 200M

[Alex Deucher]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Damien Mir
<mailings.xorg at mirabel-sil.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I recently installed Opensuse 11.1 on a HP Pavilion dv8000 ( with XPRESS
> 200M graphics ), shipped with Xorg 7.4
> (--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)" (ChipID =
> 0x5955)
>
> I am experiencing some kind of slow 2D performance, never seen before on
> any system or previous distro :
> - sometimes i can clearly see text drawing from top to bottom in a file
> manager (konqueror) or an editor (kate)
> - when switching desktops, there's some kind of tearing of the content of
> the open windows, and when doing so repeadedly, xorg eats more than 60/70%
> CPU
> - glxgears gives about 400fps
> The more open windows in the desktops, the more those symptoms are
> noticeable.
>
> With the default opensuse settings ( no parameters in Device section ie.
> XAA accel not supported anymore ) it is worse, even Konsole is sluggish.
> See :
> http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2009-02/msg00132.html
> So I switched to EXA. It is better, but it doesn't really solve.
>
> It occurs either with the default xorg 7.4 packages, the latest xorg
> compiled from sources, or the lastest packages from the opensuse build
> service.
> Note : MigrationHeuristic="smart" or "greedy" -seems- to help a bit, but
> it's not as fast as it was before.
>
> With an old opensuse 10.0 with xorg 6.8 (32bit mode if relevant) on the
> same laptop, everything is stunning fast. With OS 11.1 & xorg 7.4,
> although it is not really horrible or unusable, there's definitely
> something wrong, it feels a little sluggish in comparaison.
> Btw. glxgears gives about 780fps.
>
> Find below the xorg.conf and Xorg.log, however everything seems OK, no
> wierd errors.
> http://88.191.15.45/Xorg.0.log
> http://88.191.15.45/xorg.conf
>
> Am I missing something ? Any ideas ? Please advise.
> Could it be because of the new EXA architecture, poorly supported for
> XPRESS 200M ? The AMD64 architecture ? I am really out of ideas now.
> If you need further data or testing from my side, I will gladly provide.

If you are using a GL based compositor (compiz or kwin with GL), there
was a regression with the latest mesa release:
http://www.nabble.com/R300-regression-td23108996.html

Alex