Intel 82865G video performance a bit slower than on Breezy

[Matthew Kuiken]

Eamonn Sullivan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Rather than upgrade to Dapper, I did a clean install on another
> partition (my 2.8Ghz Celeron system has collected a load of junk in
> the transitions through Warty-Hoary-Breezy, so wanted a fresh start).
> Other than having to work around a crash in the new graphical
> installer, of which I was around the 10th person to report *after* it
> had been fixed already in daily builds (sorry), everything has gone
> smoothly. I've been able to restore a whole bunch of services I use
> (SSL apache2, moin-moin wiki, samba, subversion, etc.). And I like it.
> A lot.
>
> However, one minor quibble is that the video performance is noticeably
> slower. It's not so bad in doing normal text editing/Web browsing --
> just a bit more pokey. However, you can really see it in the
> screensavers. OpenGL things that worked smoothly in Breezy now visibly
> repaint. And the dimming that happens to the rest of the screen when
> the gtksudo dialog comes up is much slower.
>
> As anyone seen this for the Intel i810 family and have any performance 
> tips?
>
> I'm afraid that despite using Linux since TAMU, the X configuration
> files remain a total mystery to me. I've done a diff from my old Xorg
> to the new and found very little of what appear to be significant
> differences.  For example, the new one has
>
> Load "i2c"
>
> While the old has
>
> Load "dbe"
> Load "record"
>
> I have no idea of the signficance of any of those and Google doesn't
> supply much information (other than check-in source emails). I'm
> hesitant to edit the xorg.conf file directly, if it's not necessary.
>
> I've also gone through a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, but don't know
> whether I should enable framebuffer (it's disabled) or not and also
> not sure whether to specify some memory (it's a shared memory chipset
> and the RAM line comes up blank during the reconfigure). Can anyone
> suggest some settings I should try?
>
I have an i915 chip.  I found that the default was giving me so little 
video memory that the machine was having a hard time scrolling text 
smoothly.  I added a line to the device section to up the video RAM, and 
everything is *much* smoother now.

The section:
-----------------------------
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML 
Express Graphics Controller"
        Driver          "i810"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        VideoRAM        65536
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
        Screen          0
EndSection
-----------------------------

The option and screen settings are there for dual monitor stuff, and are 
not really necessary otherwise.  I set the VideoRAM to 64 MB here, but I 
had it set to 128MB when I was running a single screen mode.  You need 
to determine how much memory you want to give it based on the amount of 
main memory your system has.  I have 1.5GB, so I am not particularly 
worried about moving 128MB to the video card.  I would suggest 32MB or 
more.  The VideoRAM line is all you need to add for this.

-Matt