Sluggish 2D with radeon Xpress 200M

[Damien Mir]

Hello,

I recently installed Opensuse 11.1 on a HP Pavilion dv8000 ( with XPRESS
200M graphics ), shipped with Xorg 7.4
(--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)" (ChipID =
0x5955)

I am experiencing some kind of slow 2D performance, never seen before on
any system or previous distro :
- sometimes i can clearly see text drawing from top to bottom in a file
manager (konqueror) or an editor (kate)
- when switching desktops, there's some kind of tearing of the content of
the open windows, and when doing so repeadedly, xorg eats more than 60/70%
CPU
- glxgears gives about 400fps
The more open windows in the desktops, the more those symptoms are
noticeable.

With the default opensuse settings ( no parameters in Device section ie.
XAA accel not supported anymore ) it is worse, even Konsole is sluggish.
See :
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2009-02/msg00132.html
So I switched to EXA. It is better, but it doesn't really solve.

It occurs either with the default xorg 7.4 packages, the latest xorg
compiled from sources, or the lastest packages from the opensuse build
service.
Note : MigrationHeuristic="smart" or "greedy" -seems- to help a bit, but
it's not as fast as it was before.

With an old opensuse 10.0 with xorg 6.8 (32bit mode if relevant) on the
same laptop, everything is stunning fast. With OS 11.1 & xorg 7.4,
although it is not really horrible or unusable, there's definitely
something wrong, it feels a little sluggish in comparaison.
Btw. glxgears gives about 780fps.

Find below the xorg.conf and Xorg.log, however everything seems OK, no
wierd errors.
http://88.191.15.45/Xorg.0.log
http://88.191.15.45/xorg.conf

Am I missing something ? Any ideas ? Please advise.
Could it be because of the new EXA architecture, poorly supported for
XPRESS 200M ? The AMD64 architecture ? I am really out of ideas now.
If you need further data or testing from my side, I will gladly provide.

Dams