Terrible slowness in FreeBSD

[wethegodz]

I have FreeBSD 5.4 RC3 running on my laptop. I had deng-1.8.6 binaries installed with pkg_add. It plays extremely slow; the input from keyboard or mouse is delayed with 1-2 sec (eg. I press <shoot> and it shoots after 2 sec, I press <esc> and the menu is up after 1 sec). And the fps is very low I think. Music sounds good, though.
So it's not really playable... it's more of a tease... :(
Video board is a Radeon 7500, and sound is... Intel ...AC97 (too lazy to look it up right now).
Processor is Pentium M at 1,6 , main memory is 512MB and video memory is 32MB
I guess I'm doing something wrong, but I can't spot it.
I've searched the forum, the dhq site, and google, but haven't found anything like this.
Any ideas? Thank a lot.

[Zach Keene]

Disclaimer: I'm not a BSD user, so anything I suggest might be way off.

First thing that comes to mind: do you have direct rendering enabled? (In Linux you can find out by typing "glxinfo | grep direct" in a console.)

If not you might want to look at http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriTroubleshooting.

[SMB]

Note also that 7x00's have been noted to be unhappy with Doomsday. (There was a fuss a while ago over them screwwing up reverse-subtracted textures.) I realise upgrading laptop graphics cards (or anything else, for that matter) is a bitch, so you might have a problem if Zach didn't get it. SkyJake would know the best if there were possible getcha's with BSD, though.

[wethegodz]

Thanks, guys!
Well, glxinfo shows direct rendering is indeed enabled. So it ain't that.
But it also shows this:

.................
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating,
GLX_EXT_import_context, GLX_OML_swap_method, GLX_SGI_make_current_read,
GLX_SGIS_multisample, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig
client glx vendor string: SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
..................
OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Radeon 20040929 AGP 1x TCL
OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 6.2.1
.....................
glu version: 1.3
....................

Does this partial output look like it should?
Anyway, while googling, I DID come up across some threads about problems with radeons and dri. So maybe SMB is right...

[Zach Keene]

Thanks, guys!
Well, glxinfo shows direct rendering is indeed enabled. So it ain't that.

Hm. Well, you could check your Xorg/XFree logs for lines beginning with (WW) or (EE) to see if there are any issues there, but if glxinfo is giving you the thumbs up I don't expect you'll find anything significant.

I'm no expert in the arcane tongue of glxinfo dumps but nothing in your output looked out of place to me. (Except for the card-specific stuff it matches mine exactly.)

[BahamutZERO939]

ATI has no plans to support the Radeon 7500 with their drivers and the DRI Project only has basic drivers for it. Read the radeon.4 manual file on the xorg website and it should have some settings you can try to use in the xorg.conf file.

Try these settings in your xorg.conf and see if they help any:

Option "SWcursor" "false"
Option "NoAccel" "false"
Option "Dac6Bit" false"
Option "VideoKey" "0x1E"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "false"
Option "BusType" "AGP"
Option "DDCMode" "true"
Option "DisplayPriority" "AUTO"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"

These settings are pretty much the most common settings you can use on any Radeon chipset. However there some limitations. You will NOT have ANY sort of support for S3TC Compressed Textures, some games will run eraticly, and don't expect any tools to tweak things with.

If you want fully featured OpenGL you have several choices:

1. Get an Nvidia GeForce card and get Nvidia's GLX driver (I highly recommend this).
2. Complain a lot to ATI and pray they start supporting their stuff properly (highly doubtful).
3. Get a Radeon 9200 or later graphics card and use ATI's buggy as heck Proprietary FGLRX DRI/GLX driver.
4. Try Xi Graphics Summit Driver (It ain't free and getting the best support will run you about as much as a graphics card itself but it is about as good as it gets.)