[clug] Radeon 9200 and Xorg suckage

[Steven Hanley]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 04:55:14PM -0700, Michael Still wrote:
> Tim Potter wrote:
> >On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 09:04:30AM -0700, Michael Still wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I just picked up a Radeon 9200 PCI card for my MythTV machine, and I am 
> >>using Xorg with Drapper Drake (Ubuntu). I've tried both the ati driver 
> >>(which loads the radeon driver), and the radeon driver, and they both 
> >>consume about 80% of the CPU while the machine is playing back video.
> >>
> >>This is a reasonably grunty machine, and I'd really like the CPU back. 
> >>Have other people seen problems like this? I can't find any 
> >>documentation that suggests that the ATI binary drivers will fix it, but 
> >>I am tempted to give it a go. Does anyone know if the binary drivers 
> >>work better at video playback?
> >
> >Just FYI, I am getting about 10% CPU usage for playback on a Athlon 3000+ 
> >with a NVidia 6600, so 80% CPU sounds like something is badly wrong.
> >This is using the xv video extension.
> >
> >I haven't been able to get the xvmc driver going so there is supposed to
> >be more gains possible.
> 
> Is there a canonical way for me to tell if the driver / card supports 
> XV? The MythTV pages (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC) suggest 
> it is not supported for Radeon cards.

I do not know about XvMC however Xv works fine with th Xorg radeon+ati
driver pair and as I have a Radeon 9600 in a machine I wasd muycking around
with I instaleld the binary Ati driver and also was able to get Xv working.

It was definitely the case that watching videos (Dr Who latest season and
serenity are both fantastic) without Xv was using a horendous amount of CPU.

running xvinfo tells you if it is working and available. I had to add a few
extra options to my X file to make it work with the binary ati driver.

	See You
	    Steve

-- 
Steven Hanley sjh at svana.org http://svana.org/sjh/diary
the trouble with white people is you can't tell them apart
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