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    Jerky screensaver/3D effects

    I am using FGLRX on an ATI x1400. 3D acceleration was working just fine through the Restricted Drivers Manager, Hell, I can even enter Doom III... but 3d is jerky. Watching video, when my 3d screensaver comes on.... every second or two it has a little jerk. glxgears displays the jerks as well, even though I reach nearly 2,000 FPS. This problem seems recent, I wasn't getting these jerks on either screensaver or video before a few days ago...

    #2
    Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

    I'm far from expert on the ATI driver situation, but I think you need better performance out of your card, somehow. Here's my glxgears output:

    don@feisty:~$ glxgears
    54455 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10890.969 FPS
    54845 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10968.941 FPS
    53438 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10685.360 FPS
    54355 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10870.928 FPS
    54831 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10966.173 FPS
    54989 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10997.664 FPS
    53780 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10755.987 FPS
    54851 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10970.033 FPS
    Mine is an Nvidia GeF 7900 GS, but your ATI card is a good one, and should run faster. Maybe the fglrx gurus can help you.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

      Hmm... I get this problem too, but I hardly notice it.

      I think it's caused by something drawing on resources briefly every two seconds or so. I usually keep a session of Firefox open, as well as an instance of KDE System Guard and KSysLog on another desktop. I'm not sure if one of these causes it. You keep anything open while doing other things?
      For external use only.

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        #4
        Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

        Wow.. you run almost 11,000 FPS? My card really IS suffering. It's pretty much top of the line for laptops right now, should be able to run most new games at almost full settings. I really don't get the whole fglrx, proprietary drivers, open drivers, etc, etc... I just know that I couldn't even load X, and someone told me to load FGLRX. That's depressing, though...


        And yes, I always have things open while I am doing other things. Kopete, Amarok, KNotes... most notably Firefox... I ALWAYS have a few firefox windows open.

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          #5
          Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

          It's probably that one or more of those things are reloading something or redrawing themselves. I'm guessing Amarok is the heaviest one there, unless it's minimized to the system tray. After that it's Firefox, an infamous memory user. (I don't want to say "hog", because it can be reduced.)
          For external use only.

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            #6
            Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

            Amarok is minimized to the sys tray 95% of the time. And I only play it infrequently. Firefox, on the other hand, is ALWAYS on, and usually has a few dozen windows open. Heh, what can I say? I can't stop visiting Wikipedia, torrent sites, linux forums, cnet.com, etc... I'd still like to know however just why my FPS is soo low! If it's just FGLRX not having caught up to my card, that's annoying but doable. If it's something else... well, I paid alot to have good graphics capabilities.

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              #7
              Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

              Well, I have an X1600, and I'm beginning to think that it's not as powerful as you think it is. glxgears gives about 6500 FPS right now.

              Anyway, try closing down anything you're not using, then run fgl_glxgears. (I get about 750 FPS.)

              Also try making use of Firefox's tabs.
              For external use only.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                I get about 340 FPS.
                And I do make great use of tabs... I just have alot of them. :P

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                  #9
                  Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                  Well, I guess you just need to close down some stuff you're not using.

                  My processor is also a bit faster at 2.6ish GHz (dual core), but I'm not sure if that makes a difference.
                  For external use only.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                    That shouldn't make a difference, really. I run at 1.6 GHz... That should be far more than sufficient for running basic Kubuntu. No Beryl or anything. The most probable thing sounds like Firefox stealing up resources (although that seems odd, as it is not my CPU power - I monitor that - I have tons of free ram from my 2 GB..)

                    Firefox has done bad things to me before - I still use flash blocker, since I found out a few months ago that flash things in firefox were killing my performance.

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                      #11
                      Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                      Just for reference, here's a picture of CPU usage. The comb-like spikes on the far left and right are what I suspect are the jerks.

                      http://i15.tinypic.com/4xlkxoi.png
                      For external use only.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                        Curious.... could my attempts to make Beryl work have caused this dreadfully low fps?

                        http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=126423

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                          I had a similar problem sometime back with my new shine Radeon 9000 ;P.

                          It turned out that I have two AGP drivers loaded at startup (I'm not sure, but one was probably for the built-in motherboard card), the driver get's confused and turned to PCI-emulation.

                          But it's an old card, so it's not likely the same problem, but you can always try:

                          Code:
                          $ lsmod | grep agp
                          Only one module should be loaded.

                          Javier.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                            Oookay.. Javier. I tried that... I get this:

                            kristen@Merritt:~$ lsmod | grep agp
                            intel_agp 25116 1
                            agpgart 35400 2 fglrx,intel_agp


                            Is that seriously telling me I have two graphics components? Like, a backup onboard intel graphic card? Or what?

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: Jerky screensaver/3D effects

                              That's normal. Just a failed blind shot.

                              I had agpart, sis_agp and amd_agp .

                              Javier.

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