RV100 / 7000VE very slow?

[Roland Scheidegger]

Alex Deucher wrote:
> On 1/17/07, Roland Scheidegger <sroland at tungstengraphics.com> wrote:
>> Christian Brandt wrote:
>> > Today I installed Ubuntu 6.06 on an IBM 346 server which features a
>> > RV100 / 7000VE / 16MB onboard-gpu running at 1280x1024/24bit/60hz. I
>> > have to work for quite some days directly at this system and also in
>> the
>> > future so I have been horrified about the very low performance of the
>> > gpu: Dragging windows lags around half a second, clearing the screen
>> > takes around one second, even while typing inside a terminal window
>> I am
>> > faster than the gpu.
>> Are you using cp accel or mmio? You need to load dri/drm for the former,
>> which typically feels a bit faster. 16MB should just be enough for this
>> to work (note though that you won't really have enough video ram for
>> offscreen pixmaps).
>> I'm not exactly sure of the specifications of this server, but I think
>> it may use a 32bit only DDR interface for the graphic chip (no idea
>> about clock), should be mentioned in the xorg log file. That could lower
>> performance quite a bit probably.
> 
> I think the server based radeons are pretty well crippled.  Definitely
> no 3D and I'm not even sure the CP is functional.

I still think that 3d _should_ work on es1000 based chips (though
unofficially), and the cp almost certainly should, but there is a bug
somewhere preventing that, possibly related to latency issues. Anyway,
since the server is advertized as having a radeon 7000M, I'd suspect
this seems to be more of a radeon 7000 with ram integrated (i.e. a
notebook part), and not a es1000 (those are definitely different,
http://ati.amd.com/products/server/compare.html). Again, the log file
should tell that.

Roland