performance problems with ATI Radeon r300

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

Am Donnerstag, 2. Juli 2009 16:13 schrieb Andrew Mason:
> Yes it is really annoying, unfortunately its mostly a case of the free
> drivers not really being up to the task (yet, they are improving ) ,

So you think, a r300 should be able to handle desktop effects in principle? By 
the way, what about a r100? Should it be able, too? I have such a card in my 
office laptop.

> and AMD not caring about older models in their binary drivers.

However, Compiz Fusion worked quite well with the proprietary fglrx driver in 
Ubuntu 8.10. Window wobbling was really smooth. So isn’t there also a problem 
with KDE?

> Basically xorg is in a bit of a flux and even the Intel cards are only
> now getting back to the sort of performance they previously were,

How about KDE with Intel cards? Do desktop effects perform well? I heard that 
Intel cards are “crap”.

> AMD cards will follow but it's harder for them as the guys working on the
> Intel cards are actually from Intel. The guys working on the AMD cards
> are working for red hat, so they have to go on the documentation
> provided by ATI, and do their other work  at the same time.

So that’s bad news. Basically, it seems to mean that I will never get smooth 
desktop effects with my current laptop since when ATI drivers will offer 
reasonable performance (maybe in two or three years), I’ll have my laptop 
discarded already. :-( 

It’s really annoying. Over two years after a first KDE 4 version was expected, 
I still don’t have smooth desktop effects. :-( 

By the way, what about NVidia cards? I heard that the proprietary NVidia 
driver also has problems with KDE. Are these fixed meanwhile?

Is there any work from the KDE developers to improve performance of desktop 
effects, or is the current implementation considered good enough?

> It's awesome that KDE are taking a no hacks approach.

What do you mean with “no hacks approach”? That the KDE developers don’t use 
hacks to circumvent graphics driver deficiencies? While this is, in fact, 
awesome from a technical point of view, it is awful from a users 
perspective. ;-) 

> It just sucks that the time that KDE became stable was when Xorg was also in
> flux.

Well, I use KDE 4.2.3 with the “old” 1.4 X server but have the described 
problems nevertheless.

Anyway, thanks for the info.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang
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