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    Ati X1800 - Slow KDE perfomance & Games freezing

    Hi all,

    Me and my wife recently made the switch to Linux (I've tried various distros over the past years). Although kubuntu runs fine at my computer (I have nvidia card), in my wife's computer it does not perform very well.

    She has an Ati X1800. Initially I installed the proprietary ati driver that kubuntu suggested (from a popup window). As the performance in KDE (4.2) was not so great, I download and installed the driver 9.1 (I selected the option to install the generic version, not distro-specific).

    Now, some problems that I have are:

    1) Some sluggish performance at KDE (even after disabling the composite effects)
    2) Sometimes when I play a video, or an mp3 with visualization effects from the player, the screen goes black for a second every few seconds.
    3) I tried to check the 3D performance, so I installed the game Alien Arena and launched it. I got to the menus, started a game, and as soon as the game started and I saw the first 3D graphics, the computer froze there and I had to reboot. The same happened when I tried to test a media center application, boxee, which froze after a few clicks.

    From the catalyst control center, I have set everything for performance. Catalyst A.I. is set to "advanced" and vsync is "always on".

    One question that I have, is should I had first remove the proprietary drivers installed by kubuntu before installing 9.1? Should I try re-installing them with the "distro-specific" version? If yes, should I first uninstall everything and start over?

    In general, do you have any idea why these problems happen?

    Also, just to mention that before kubuntu, she was running Vista with aero enabled and it was running very smoothly. Also she was running games like world of warcraft with very good performance, so it's not that the pc can't handle the load.

    The computer is an Athlon X2 4400, 2gb ram, Ati X1800 XT 512.

    Thanks in advance

    #2
    Re: Ati X1800 - Slow KDE perfomance & Games freezing

    I have an older notebook with ATI x1300 and my wife has a different model with ATI x1600, so similar to your's with the x1800.

    One thing I noticed with Ibex is that I needed to run
    sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow xserver-xorg
    and then choose frame buffer device, which is one of the very few options available and it seemed to make a big improvement to performance. This was after installing the ATi driver.

    If it doesn't work, or messes up your system, it will copy your old /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to the same name with date and time added. All you need to do to restore it is change that back from xorg.conf200902031011 to xorg.conf

    Hope this helps.

    HP Compaq nc6400, 2Gi, 100Gi, ATI x1300 with 512M

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