Solving 2D rendering problems on an ATI X1600

My current laptop has a beautiful piece of crap of an <a href="http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonx1600/index.html">ATI Mobility Radeon X1600</a>. At first I installed <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu 8.04</a> on it and immediately switched to the proprietary ATI driver (to get more features and better support for multi-head). However, the display always seemed sluggish.. I never use 3D or Composite, it all seemed related to 2D rendering. For instance, when I switched workspaces I often had to wait 10 seconds for windows to be redrawn. Still, I managed to work like this for a while. One day however, I decided to try the <a href="http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon">open source drivers</a> (it seems they have initial support for the R500 chip on this graphics board). The good news is that is supports multi-head profiles far better than the proprietary driver (<a href="http://www.x.org/wiki/Projects/XRandR">XRandR</a> 1.2 FTW!). Still, the 2D sucked, got no 3D nor XVideo overlay… I even thought “oh this must be an Ubuntu thing”... At the beginning of this week I managed to install <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> Unstable on this laptop, but had the same problems using the open source “radeon” driver…. On a desperate move, I’ve tried the latest and bleeding edge ATI proprietary driver. For my surprise, all my problems were solved and the card is working properly! So I decided to log here the steps I took to get the things properly (remember, I’m running Debian unstable). <h3>Instructions</h3> First, we have to download the latest drivers from ATI from <a href="http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html">their website</a> Then as root run: <pre> ./ati-driver-installer* --extract fglrx cd fglrx ./packages/Debian/ati-packager.sh --buildpkg sid cd .. dpkg -i *.deb </pre> This will build <code>deb's</code> from the ATI distribution file and install them or your system. The next step is to build the actual driver, and for that you can use module-assistant like this: <pre> m-a prepare m-a update m-a a-i fglrx </pre> This will build and install the <code>fglrx</code> driver for your current installed kernel. Then you must configure Xorg. I followed this steps: <pre> aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=horizontal </pre> After this I just started X and it worked perfectly. I mean, I had horizontal BigDesktop, fast 2D rendering, 3D, XVideo overlay on both displays and suspend is working like a charm. The only problem left is that my second display has a bigger resolution that the main one. However, the ATI driver sets the second display to the same resolution as the first. To work around this problem I just had to manually edit <code>/etc/X11/xorg.conf</code> and add at the <code>Section "Device"</code> this: <pre> Option "Mode2" "1680x1050" </pre> Replace the resolution with the native resolution of your second display. Restart X and BANG, it should work :) Hope that this instructions can help you somehow. 107 solving-2d-rendering-problems-on-an-ati-x1600

2008-05-28T11:24:00-07:00