FS#8777 - Rage Mobility (mach64) slow/glitchy with 16 bit color depth (xorg-server 1.4-5)

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Gary D. Huffman, II (Arch4Ever) - Wednesday, 28 November 2007, 03:12 GMT
Last edited by Aaron Griffin (phrakture) - Thursday, 19 June 2008, 18:34 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Alexander Baldeck (kth5)
Architecture All
Severity High
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2007.08-2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:

Performance is a bit slow at 24 bit color, playing full screen high resolution video + audio (pretty much expected given 8 megs of VRAM @ 1024x768). However, performance at 16 bit color is strange at best. For example window resize operations cause minor freezes/glitches, but full screen high resolution video + audio is fast as expected.

Most (all?) other distributions performed much better in every area at 16 bit color with this video chipset. Any thoughts anyone?
This task depends upon

Closed by  Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Thursday, 19 June 2008, 18:34 GMT
Reason for closing:  Upstream
Comment by Gary D. Huffman, II (Arch4Ever) - Monday, 24 December 2007, 04:14 GMT
This is still a problem with xorg-server 1.4.0.90-3 and xf86-video-ati 6.7.197-1.
Comment by Gary D. Huffman, II (Arch4Ever) - Friday, 16 May 2008, 20:20 GMT
This is still occurring with xorg-server 1.4.0.90-10 and xf86-video-ati 6.8.0-3.

I decided to give hardware acceleration a shot to see if that would change anything. I recompiled my xf86-video-ati with a modified PKGBUILD, and compiled the latest drm.ko/mach64.ko from freedesktop.org git. Everything seems to be working fine, except maximizing a window is still extremely slow at 16 bit color (it's fine at 24 bit). I decided to check the MTRR setup, in case that was being setup incorrectly by the kernel modules, and indeed it was. However, I made a script to fix that, and the weird slowness at certain operations (in 16 bit color) still persists. :(
Comment by Glenn Matthys (RedShift) - Tuesday, 17 June 2008, 09:19 GMT
Have you tried posting this bug upstream?
Comment by Gary D. Huffman, II (Arch4Ever) - Tuesday, 17 June 2008, 22:29 GMT
No. I was thinking it might be specific to this distribution since I've never encountered the problem before. Unfortunately, I have no other machines with this video chipset to test it on right now (and I use this one quite a bit so I don't do a lot of testing on it). I'm surprised no one else seems to be having the problem, but I suppose the chipset is getting a bit old. I will try to find the time to report it upstream though.
Comment by Glenn Matthys (RedShift) - Thursday, 19 June 2008, 10:24 GMT
I have a laptop with an ATI Rage Mobility VGA controller, using the xorg ati module, and performance is fine here. So this probably occurs only on certain revisions/editions of the ATI hardware, certainly restricting it to an upstream bug.

Just to be sure it's a bug, can you post your xorg.conf here?

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