ATI Binary Driver, xorg, and Debian
I installed the ATI binary drivers on my debian system. Everything seemed to be okay, but I was getting lousy GL performance. So I had to figure out why.
First step is to see which OpenGL drivers are being loaded. Open a command prompt and type fglrxinfo. You should see a vendor string like this:
display: :0.0 screen: 0 OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 Generic OpenGL version string: 1.3.5461 (X4.3.0-8.19.10)
I didn't. Mine said I was using the Mesa drivers. Mesa is great, but those aren't the drivers I wanted to use.
Next step, why is Mesa getting loaded rather than the ATI drivers. Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There's lots of stuff in here, but don't be too intimidated. Look for things that say error. In my case I saw an error that told me DRI wasn't loading. Hmm, that would explain it. DRI is the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. ATI's Gl depends on DRI. Here's what it looked like:
(WW) fglrx(0): *********************************************** (WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! * (WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) * (WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) * (WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available * (WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *
So I searched for the error message I was getting. Not a lot of help was out there, really, but I eventually found a website that told me that Composite doesn't work with ATI's DRI implementation. Turning off Composite is pretty easy. In your /etc/X11/xorg.conf add the following:
Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "false" EndSection
Bingo. That did it for me. I'd like to be able to use Composite (it allows you to do some interesting things with transparency and xfce), but I'd rather have a fast driver.
BTW, I've seen some posts suggesting using an option in your xorg.conf called AllowGLXWithComposite. Sorry to inform you, but that's a nvidia option, not an ATI one.