ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 configuration

[aplannan]

Hi,
Wondering if anyone might be able to offer some assistance with what I think might be a video driver issue. Certain apps that I use are causing huge spikes in cpu usage by Xorg. My Xorg is initialized using :

/usr/local/bin/Xorg -nolisten tcp

I have been trying out a number of different sequencers and multitrackers. Some of these are causing huge cpu loads when I hit play and either a time curser or pattern begins to scroll (Renoise and non-daw). Some do not cause this (qtractor). And one is causing this probel at start up (sunvox). Each of these programs uses different graphics libraries to render their gui's:

qtractor-qt4
sunvox-SDL
non-daw-fltk
renoise- not sure

could this have an effect on how Xorg deals with them, and do I need to do something to configure my video card?
Thanks in advance for any help

Andy

[gutmensch]

Can't say much about your problems, maybe next time attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but however... you can try to play with the Xorg driver radeon settings, exit from X to prompt (Ctrl+Alt+Bksp), sudo su and run X -configure. In the created xorg.conf.new you can find misc options for the radeon driver. One of the switches in the file is for example "AccelMethod" with options XAA (old acceleration architecture) and EXA (new one). By default Xorg uses the new one, but I found especially on older Radeons that XAA works better or at least less unstable... so when you uncomment the line and put XAA there, copy xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and run startx again.

More hacking options for radeon can be found here: http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man4/radeon.4.html

[curaga]

None of your apps seem to use opengl, so the main question is how do you have configured Xorg? Please post your xorg.0.log so we see whether you have 2d accel.

[aplannan]

Thank you for your help. I will try some of your suggestions. Here is my Xlog as well.

[curaga]

You do have 2d accel (XAA), though it seems to be in pci mode. Trying newer versions (TC 4.4, Xorg 7.6) may be useful. On your current setup, perhaps try installing graphics- and firmware-radeon onboot.

[aplannan]

Curaga, thank you for the advice. Would those be boot codes added to grub or to my .xsession

[Rich]

Hi aplannan
Those are extensions, install them using AppBrowser. You may or may not have to reboot.

[aplannan]

Thank you everyone, I'll give it a go and keep you updated.  I'm constantly impressed by the level of help I recieve on this forum.