Compiz-Fusion performance issue - Everything is extremely slow, laggy, choppy, etc.

[Ish]

Alright here's what I know:
Graphics Card: X800 XL All-In-Wonder edition
Graphics Driver: 8.40.4 proprietary linux driver taken from the official website
Compiz-Fusion: 5.2 (Development) downloaded from the PCLOS 2007 testing repositories.
OS: PCLinuxOS 2007

Problem: Every plugin is extremely slow. This isn't just something "I can deal with" it's slow to the point of hindering usability. So here's some more data:

glxgears FPS: 874 frames in 5.3 seconds = 164.330 FPS <-


"direct rendering: Yes"


Output of fglrxinfo:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI RADEON X800 XL
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6747 (8.40.4)


Result of compiz --replace ccp && emerald --replace & (This completely locked up the session and I had to log out):

[1] 4993
[***@*** ~]$ compiz (core) - Fatal: GLX_SGIX_fbconfig is missing
compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :93.0


Anyone who has any ideas or suggestions please post them :) It would be uberness if I could get everything to run properly :)

Thanks in advance,
~Ish

[adamk]

When you don't have Xgl enabled, does 'glxinfo | grep -i direct' show that you have direct rendering?

Adam

[Ish]

"direct rendering: Yes"

I will add that to my first post.

[adamk]

You say that compiz is running painfully slow, but from the error message you posted, it doesn't look like compiz is running at all. Do you normally start compiz from the terminal that way?

Adam

[Ish]

I believe I misunderstood you when you said "when you don't have xgl enabled"
I logged out and logged in with no 3D effects, I was under the impression that compiz-fusion wouldn't run for me without xgl, I'm sorry I misunderstood, what exactly did you want me to do to disable xgl and keep running compiz-fusion? When I do "glxinfo | grep -i direct" while running compiz-fusion (although xgl is still in the process table) I get:

Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":93.0".
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

[adamk]

Unfortunately, I don't know how to disable Xgl on PCLinuxOS, but the fact that you had direct rendering does suggest that you were not using Xgl. However, my previous comments still stand :-)

Does compiz even start up for you? How are you starting up compiz?

Adam

[Ish]

I use the PCLOS configuration center to start it (Hardware - Configure 3D desktop effects) from there I have an option to run natively (that left me gui-less) and xgl which I'm using, then it has an option for compiz or compiz-fusion. Both compiz and compiz-fusion suffer from the same performance problem. Judging by how my login splash freezes when I have 3D enabled I'd say it's starting during the login splash.

[adamk]

I'd be interested in seeing if there's any strange output when you run compiz from a terminal, but you probably need to LD_PRELOAD the mesa library in order to do that, and I'm not sure where that's located in PCLinuxOS.

I'm curious if you've thought about running compiz with the open source ATI drivers, though. It should run just fine on that video card.

Adam

[Ish]

In my past experiences using the proprietary driver seems to have worked better on this setup. But I have tried, I think I couldn't get the option to run compiz-fusion to become enabled when I tried it last. Which I'm sure some xorg.conf tweaking could fix... But I'm not competent enough to do that, and I'm pretty skittish about editing files like that. I did try running it natively but that booted without window boarders and CF was not running at all... When I ran it with xgl everything worked... albeit horrendously slow.

I tried running "compiz" from konsole (although I didn't do anything special with mesa or preloading) and I got:

compiz (core) - Error: Screen 0 on display ":0.0" already has a window manager; try using the --replace option to replace the current window manager.
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

I believe that's because KDM is on display :0.0 so I don't that error is very helpful... perhaps if I give it another display to run on I'll get a more informative error? Although, lack of competence becomes an issue again :p

[adamk]

What's the output of 'file /usr/bin/compiz'?

[Ish]

/usr/bin/compiz: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

[adamk]

Alright, since /usr/bin/compiz is a binary, and not a wrapper script, when you run compiz from a terminal you'd definitely need to LD_PRELOAD the mesa GL library and run compiz with the --replace option. Here are some common locations for the mesa library that other distributions use:

/usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa
/usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib/libGL.so.1.2
/opt/mesa-xgl/lib/libGL.so.1.2
/usr/lib/fglrx/diversions/libGL.so.1.2

If you find the mesa library, you could run compiz with:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa compiz --replace --sm-disable ccp &

(Of course, substituting the correct location for the mesa library).

Short of seeing if you get any error messages, I'm not sure there's much we can do for you.

[Ish]

That file for PCLinuxOS is located in /usr/lib/mesa
Here's the output:

[***@*** ~]$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1.2 compiz --replace --sm-disable ccp &
[1] 15435
[***@*** ~]$ compiz (core) - Fatal: No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work.
compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

[adamk]

I'm sorry, but I think I'm out of my depth here. I just don't know enough about Xgl on PCLinuxOS to even guess what's going on. Maybe someone else on these forums has used fglrx on PCLinuxOS and can shed some light on why:

A) You can't get compiz to run from a terminal.
B) Why it's so slow when you enable it through the configuration center.

[Ish]

Alright, thanks for your help :)
Hopefully someone will see this who might something. In the meantime I'll PM getinthere. They seem like the compiz-fusion authority for PCLinuxOS. Maybe they'll know what's up.
Thanks again Adam for your help :)

[user5124]

Your glxgears result seems low?

91382 frames in 5.0 seconds = 18276.294 FPS

[adamk]

glxgears is not a benchmark, and is no indication of how well compiz will run on a video card.