I had posted this in cwwilson721's "Enabling 3D Acceleration" thread, but I realized that it probably deserved its own topic, since enabling 3D acceleration isn't the problem here.

I had gotten the free radeon driver to work for me, including MergedFB with acceleration et al. However, Unreal Tournament 2004 (as well as other modern games, as I have read) uses S3 Texture Compression, which is only in the proprietary driver. I was noticing performance issues which I attributed to this fact, so now I'm trying to get where I was with fglrx.

With clone mode (i.e. nothing special, but with both monitors plugged in) UT2004 works fine. Under Big Desktop, however, input seems sluggish (it goes to clone mode when running in full-screen. I see the problem both in full-screen and windowed when running under a Big Desktop config). In the menus, the mouse has about a half second delay in all movements. In game, about half the time any keyboard/mouse input has a similar delay. Rendering seems to be OK. I really don't want to restart X under a different configuration just to run games (note I haven't tried any other than UT2004). Is this a known issue?
EDIT: I tried switching to clone mode with xrandr before launching the game, but it doesn't help.

My other issue is that my monitors are switched. My DVI output is treated as secondary, and VGA is primary. Once I've started X I can run 'aticonfig --swap-monitor' and everything's fine, but the setting doesn't stick (it doesn't add anything to xorg.conf like many of the aticonfig options do). Other than physically switching my monitors (I'd rather not, as I'd like my DVI to be primary) or putting the command in .xinitrc or something, is there a way to make the outputs stay swapped?

Radeon 9200 128MB DVI+VGA
Slackware 11.0
Kernel 2.6.17.13 (modified huge26)
fglrx 8.28.8

Bump, with some additional information.

To run X in clone mode, I had been commenting out everything related to Big Desktop. I decided to simply comment out and Big Desktop was disabled, but I still had the lag in UT2004. So, I commented one additional line: and that solved it. I had tried leaving this option out with Big Desktop enabled, but that seems to disable any direct rendering too, so that's out of the question.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I have several comments:

1. S3TC is available in the open source driver in the form of a library,
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheideg...3tc_index.html
Of course you take responsibility if you use the code. Yes it is open source.

2. You are using Radeon 9200 and the rather unsupported last working version of fglrx for it. Eventually it's simply not going to work. You'll need to convert anyway.

3. I have tested UT2004 on my Radeon 9200 quite frequently. I think everything with the game as far as I can tell works fine at this point. You should really upgrade to Mesa 7.0. It's very good. You can also back port the ATI X.org driver (right now 6.6.192). I know that you can use the new stuff on Slack 11+X.org 6.9 as I did it for a long time. Currently I use slackware-current, as it's nice right now .

Hmm... I will look into this, thanks for the link.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I realize that the driver isn't the newest, but as you say it's the newest that supports my card. I don't see why it would eventually simply not work. Also, what do you mean by "convert"? To open source drivers? If that's what you mean, as noted in my first post I actually switched from the open source driver because of the S3TC thing. Yes, I would prefer open source.

Here you have lost me. Mesa 7.0? Do you mean X.org 7.0? What do you mean by back porting the driver? Are you suggesting I try the latest open source driver, which is only supported under X.org 7.0? Sorry, and I appreciate any clarification.

Thanks for your post, I will check out that S3TC link.

Yes, you shouldn't use the outdated fglrx. It certainly has bugs that I know will never be fixed.



Mesa 7.0 is the latest version of Mesa. You can use it on X.org 6.9, I'm pretty sure. You should use it if at all possible. xf86-video-ati you might be able to "backport", or another words compile and stick it in your X.org 6.9 as well too.

Or you could just upgrade to slackware-current.

OK, I finally got some time to check out the S3TC thing for the radeon driver. After reading that page you linked to, it seems that it is already supported (the library is just for software compression, which UT2004 doesn't use); I just needed to enable it with driconf. I did this, but UT2004 still gives a noticeably lower frame rate than with fglrx. Just to be sure I installed the library, but it didn't affect anything.

So my last hope is that upgrading something else will help. You mentioned Mesa 7.0 but when I go to the Mesa site, the latest development release is 6.5.3... Where is this 7.0? Slack 11.0 comes with 6.4.1 which is only 0.0.1 older than the latest stable, is upgrading really going to improve things?

EDIT: Also, what is xf86-video-ati?

Yes. It's loads better. Enable hyperZ too.

Sorry 7.0 isn't out yet, but you should use the latest 6.5.3 or git. Slackware-current uses it, and it has always been stable for me.

It's the X.org driver.