Direct rendering won't use hardware.

TheOtherShoe · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 47 Location: Portland, OR

I've been googling around and trying to find a fix for this for a while and I have made a lot of progress in terms of getting glxinfo to say "direct rendering: yes", but now I am thoroughly flummoxed.

I am running a Gateway 450 laptop, ATI Radeon Mobility 6 LY and the 2.6.0-test6 kernel with proper AGP and DRM support built in.

Basically I have direct rendering, but only in software. I would really like to get real hardware acceleration going as software doesn't just doesn't cut it for anything besides screensavers. glxinfo gives me the following lines:

dberkholz · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2003 2:57 am Post subject:

That is hardware. Yes it says Mesa, but it's not Indirect (which means software).

The M6 doesn't have TCL.

Don't know about the BIOS thing.

TheOtherShoe · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 47 Location: Portland, OR

Ok, so it is working yes, but the direct rendering is definitely not using the full capabilites of my video card. Armagetron and Tuxracer work fine, but anything more demanding than that is just very slow. And textures don't seem to work at all.

Am I going to just have to put up with this until someone comes out with a driver for non-TCL cards? Or is there another way?
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dberkholz · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2003 6:52 am Post subject:

More demanding things are slow because the card just isn't that fast. This is a driver for non-TCL cards as well as for TCL cards.

TheOtherShoe · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 47 Location: Portland, OR

I really hate to use the w word, but this card is plenty fast in windows.
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dberkholz · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2003 7:06 am Post subject:

TheOtherShoe · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 47 Location: Portland, OR

Maybe I should provide a little more background. I have been using this computer for about a year to play high end games in windows. It is pretty fast, and anything up to about UT 2003 level is totally playable.

I recently switched entirely to linux, and I wanted to see if I could keep my gaming habit going. So I try Homeworld (which is not that new and should be super smooth) and it is all choppy on me and I can't see anything in the game because textures aren't working. This is with wine which I imagine would affect the performance, but I get similar problems with native games; Savage plays at about 10 fps and is all grey, again no textures. Even Starcraft is kinda sluggish.

I don't want to sound like I am whining or being argumentative, I am just saying that hardware acceleration is not working for me and I would like to find a way to fix this.
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TheOtherShoe · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 47 Location: Portland, OR

Sorry, I didn't catch that last post before posting my reply. Does lack of directX really make that much of a performance hit? I would have to repartition and install windows to try that, but maybe I will anyway.
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