Not running smooth... ideas?

Hmmmmm
Compiz is/was beryl correct?

It maps everything as a texture (which is why you need a bit of a beast of a PC to watch full motion video under it. (the m2n box in my sig can handle it, but an athlon 2800+ with a 6800pro failed rather badly).
It can basically stuff up a whole lot of stuff.

Still, your symptoms are still really terrible, and I assume (nv person speaking here) that the X800 is not a weakling.
I reckon the other chaps above are onto something with the driver versioning etc, as something's not right.

Have you any CPU meters installed (I reccomend gkrellm, it's not as customizable as karamba, but it is much more functional than the likes of the KDE resource meter (and I cannase find that these days), BUT, it is 24/7/365 stable, pretty, and plugintastic), what is going on with the CPU?
does it spike wildly when you move stuff or scroll? Is it "up to something" all the time?
 
OK gkrellm is installed. No unusual spikes. No spikes really. Just sitting along nicely. Almost.... too nice... lol

Actually. Idle it sits at <10% CPU usage. When scrolling in firefox it shoots up to 90%. With the Xorg shooting up in usage.
 
thegoonden - i had compiz running quite smoothly on a EEEPC with 2gb ram under Arch, doesn't always require bleeding edge hardware but needs to be configured correctly.

tobes - maybe there's inherent problems with the x800 and the proprietary drivers, i've never used one so i'm at a loss but knowing ATI hardware under linux it wouldn't surprise me, best to start trawling the linux forums.
 
I always had trouble with my X850. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't with no logical connection between the two states.

In general the ATI proprietary driver is horrible for these cards. The sad thing is that there's not much that can be done, save continuing Mesa development.
 
Oh well. It's a bit of a bummer.

So to sum it up, ATI don't have open source drivers? Just their own linux drivers which are not 100% stable?

If I was to buy a new laptop or build a new PC. Would there be a combination of hardware which is 100% supported and would show me what linux could really do?
 
If you are not planning to game the knackers off it, any old nvidia card will do.
If you're not used to nv naming schemes, the last 3 numbers are the "power rating" you might say, and the first number is the card's series, denoting it's position in the technology chain......so a 6800 will utterly devastate a 7200, but the 7200 will have more modern capabilities.
5 series and (early)7 series cards are their weak/flakey ones, with the 6's and 8's being very very good.



AFAIK, all ATi cards suffer from hopeless drivers, but someone did say that there were 3rd party ones that work right, either available now, or coming soon.



One of the oddities of current Linux is that far from the dark days of 1999, it now supports SO much hardware it's unreal. A livecd distro can boot almost any PC, and detect and drive most of it's components in just the time it takes to boot (essentially the same thing windows takes 45 minutes to do.....unless windows is even slower at copying files than I thought....and still asks for driver CD's for half your toys).
It still hates "winmodems" but then so does windows (along with any right thinking user, they're awful things that should have died with dialup but live on to cause suffering). And it might be a bit funny with extremely non-standard hardware.....although in the case of high-end non-standard/eseoteric kit, there will be linux geeks using it who've got it all sorted for you.
In short, apart from ATi cards an internal modems, you don't need to make too many hardware choices just to suit Linux.

Tell me, what results do you get if you run glxgears either with compiz or without.

marcsay: I should have been more specific, I had no bother at all with Beryl on the older machine, other than FMV which was lumpy and jumpy as hell. Everything else, including swining 4 desktops around like a madman, was smooth as glass. But it will seriously obviate a driver problem, that's for sure.
 
thegoonden said:
AFAIK, all ATi cards suffer from hopeless drivers, but someone did say that there were 3rd party ones that work right, either available now, or coming soon.
Click to expand...

i can speak from experience that the 38x0 series work very well with the proprietary drivers, although i've never tried them with gaming under linux as i always just prefer to boot into windows for that - for video and general 2d/desktop work with compiz/xorg 7.3 they're spot on.

but for someone who just wants working 2d under linux and doesn't want to spend money i'd defintely go nvidia.

once the newer open source drivers are finished we should see some better compatability i think.
 
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