[Dapper] ATI Radeon : installing proprietary drivers ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 01:09 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> > Maybe it needs a little bit of tweaking to get it going ?
> I wouldn't know :) Maybe Google does

Ahhh, I was in the process of filing a bug in Malone, but made the
effort to search existing bugs for "radeon", and eventually found a bug
report that helped me ! Basically I did it right, there is nothing
special to do.... except that you MUST remove the fglrx packages !
Simply selecting the right driver in xorg.conf is not enough, fglrx
still interferes.

Okay, so did that and oh magic, 3D with 'Radeon' driver works ! And it
doesn't have any of the annoying bugs that fglrx has, yeepee ! :-)
Okay let's try the games... oh no, it's still slow ! :-O
In the car game I get 12FPS at best, when I am alone on the track, and
5FPS when I venture mistakenly off-road...
In the flight sim, X-Plane to name it, I get 5 "SPF" (seconds per
frame... :-/ )... ie unplayable.
I looked in the man page of the Radeon driver, looked for options that
related to performance, and added all of them:

Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "ColorTiling" "TRUE"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "TRUE"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"

But that didn't make the slightest difference, not even a single FPS
more :-/

So the situation is:

- Proprietary 'fglrx' : good performance, but severe bugs.
- Open Source 'Radeon': no bugs, but useless performance.

Why do we have to choose between performance or bugs :-(
End result is the same anyway: they are un-usable :o(

I doubt ATI will bother fixing the bugs in their driver since it's
probably already obsolete form their point of view.
On the other side, the open-source driver could potentially be improved
since we have the source, but I doubt the devs will find it worth the
effort, since by the time they succeed, the card would be 10 year old
and completely obsolete :-/

Oh well, let's hope that this "OpenGraphics" project does become reality
eventually, cross fingers...

--
Vince