[Preston] Making XFree86 Go Fast

[Andrew King]

Hi all,

I've spent a bit of time recently trying to make XFree86 go fast on my
system - so that Quake will run smoothly in 800x600x16, so that glxgears
runs >30fps in full screen, so that the platform games I keep trying to
write actually run at a playable speed, etc.  Everyone says how Linux
can run all these ace games smoothly in full screen, so like, it'd be
good to see it actually work.  So far...

Hardware is:

AMD Athlon 700MHz
512MB PC133 SDRAM
Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm IDE disk
ATI 128 Rage Pro TF Graphics card, vendor ID 1787:0801

(the latter three have been upgrades over the past year bought purely in
the hope that they'll sort this out...)

Software is:

- Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r0, with a few dozen packages updated over the
Internet with apt-get.
- Kernel 2.4.20 (just installed the image through apt-get)
- XFree86 4.2.1.

So far, I've managed to:

- Enable DMA on the Seagate
- Get XFree86 to use the r128 driver (instead of VESA)
- Enable MTRR
- Enable XVideo
- Enable DRI

...and none of it makes the slightest bit of difference.  The only open
source thing left I can find is framebuffer, which I'm reading into now.
I'm writing a HOWTO (or maybe a HOWITRIEDTO) as I'm going along,
which'll be up when there's some results.  Basic question is though:

- Is enabling the framebuffer through the kernel and XFree86 likely to
  make a difference?

- If it's not, will anything?

The one thing I'll stop short at is using the proprietary drivers
that ATI released - that'd be a step backwards.  So if that's the only
way, I'll have to put up with slow graphics.

If anyone's got a clue, I'd be grateful.  Otherwise, I'll post the
results when I've sussed it/given up.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew