Composite on RV350

[Roland Dreier]

I have an IBM ThinkPad T42 with an ATI "Mobility Radeon 9600" (RV350),
and I just gave X11R6.8.1 a try.  Everything worked perfectly, but of
course I wanted to try the fancy Composite eye candy a shot.
Unfortunately it was quite slow.  With xcompmgr, dragging translucent
windows was noticably laggy (to the point of being not fun to use),
and metacity 2.8.1's built-in compositor was unusably slow (to move a
window, I would have to wait a second for it to turn translucent
before it started to move, and the window lagged a second or two
behind the mouse).

The laptop has a Pentium M 735 (1.7 GHz) so there should be plenty of
horsepower.  Is there any hope for speeding this up, or do we have to
wait/pray for ATI to open Radeon specs?  Would running the closed ATI
drivers help, or do they only accelerate 3D?

By the way, I also noticed that my mouse pointer theme no longer had
an effect and I just got standard old X cursors.  Any idea what I was
doing wrong (I'm running Debian sarge with XFree86 4.3; I moved
/usr/X11R6 out of the way, installed Xorg into /usr/local/Xorg and
then made /usr/X11R6 a symlink to /usr/local/Xorg)?

Thanks,
 Roland