[SOLVED] Compiz Performance with ATI x700

Question

So this is my story:
I have an Acer Aspire Laptop with a ATI x700 Mobility graphics card. A couple of days ago I installed Arch for the first time. I installed the "xf86-video-ati" package and compiz-fusion and it worked great. Then I managed to break my system to unusability and decided to reinstall. In the meantime there was an update for xf86-video-ati (from 6.8.0-4 to 6.9.0-5) and now I have some quite annoying performance issues with compiz: maximizing/unmaximizing as well as unminimizing a window (so I assume everytime it has to load a new window into the memory) takes like 2 seconds (while working perfectly smoothly before).
I tryed the options suggested at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI … nce_tuning but without success. Since I use exactly the same xorg configuration as before I can only speculate that it has to do something with the package update (maybe some option that was enabled by default before now has to be manually set?). I also tried the catalyst drivers but performance was pretty much the same.
Anyways, here are the relevant parts (so I think) of my xorg.conf file
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
Load "drm"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "** ATI (generic) [ati]"
Driver "ati"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,AUTO"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0666
EndSection
Any ideas what I could do to bring back compiz at the speed that my graphics card already proved to be capable of are very welcome
Last edited by Baufo (2008-12-08 16:46:37)

Answer 1

I think I just experienced the same problem with my x800gto.  It was very slow to toggle between vertical/horizontal/full maximizations.  I tried changing the default acceleration method from XAA to EXA.  This seems to have solved the problem, and now my wobbly windows change size with butter smoothness.  The changes I made were to add
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
under the device setting.  There reason you need no such option for XAA is because, to my undestanding, XAA is the default.  Making this change means you should also comment out
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true" #needed for aiglx
since it is now irrelevant.
Since you also use an ATI card, I will suggest configuration options that work well for me:
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "GARTSize" "64"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
Option "ColorTiling" "True"
Good luck.  Hope this does the trick for you.