What happened to my performance?

[curmudgeon]

I hope this makes sense (as X remains on of THE most
mystifying things in the universe to me).

The system: P4 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Radeon 7000 with
16 MB RAM (onboard).

This worked fine for me (fat, dumb, and happy) with the
default X driver for quite a while, though (I didn't know it
at the time) at 1280 X 960 resolution.

I recently obtained an LCD monitor that likes to complain
(and go blank) at any resolution other than 1280 X 1024
(usually at 75 Hz, though sometimes it will complain and
demand 60 Hz for some reason I can't comprehend).

I thought I had had 1280 X 1024 all along, but changing
it did not seem like it would become a problem. However,
apparently the default driver will not do 1280 X 1024 (at
least I couldn't get it to do it). At this point, I discovered
the radeon driver (not the proprietary ATI driver) which
looked like the perfect solution to my problem. It has to
work better, right? I changed the config file, and fired it
up at the correct resolution. Problem solved!

Well, not exactly. I only have one program that requires
even a modicum of video performance - a pinball game.
With the new driver, the game became unplayable (it
updated the screen too slowly). Glxgears shows 225 fps
(i don't remember exactly what I had before - maybe
around 1100). I didn't change anything other than the
driver and the resolution.

By now, my question has become obvious (and I hope
that the answer will, too, to somebody).

Thank you in advance for your help.

[shade266]

I have the exact same Radeon 7000 (which is a tad old btw), and have experienced the same loss of performance. I recently upgraded Xorg from 6.8.0-r3 to the most current and nothing has changed. I can't use any xine-ui without dropping too many frames nor will mplayer play in fullscreen mode any longer.

ATI and VIA need a swift kick in the rumpus.
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