Xgl Success Stories

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Those experiences have been taken from the the forum thread xgl - success stories?

Contents

Desktops

Sorting on videocard: from old to new

nVidia

nVidia Geforce 3 ti 200 (P4 1.8 Ghz, 512 MB Ram, nvidia)

( Questions/Remarks: profoX )

  • Compiled myself (buildscript by Shadowhand, pkgbuilds by Mikos)

compiz-quinn-cvs (20060601-1) mesa-xgl-cvs (20060601-1) xgl-cvs (20060601-1)

Everything works pretty good. Small video windows play back smooth. Big video (640x480 and higher will make everything pretty sluggish. Renicing your video player and Xgl will help a little bit. But it will still be sluggish.)

Edit: lately it seems to work/respond better already! I can now also watch big/maximized video's in mplayer with the gl2 output. It's really good. I would say nVidia Geforce 3 ti 200 is fully supported now! Everything works very stable and pretty fast. (Fast enough, don't expect to be running 5 movies at the same time while switching the cube at a decent framerate though)

nVidia Geforce FX 5100 (AMD K7 2.4GHz, 1.5 GB)

Works perfectly with xgl-cvs 20060602 and compiz-quinn 0.0.13-0quinn26

-accel gl:fbo will crash when you run opengl apps, -accel gl:pbuffer works fine

-accel xv:pbuffer seems to be a bit faster than -accel xv:fbo. In mplayer xv is always much faster than gl/gl2

nVIDIA config: fast write enabled, SBA enabled, Render Accel enabled. compiz is started with __GL_FSAA_MODE=7 __GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO=3 __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 (for compiz only, not xgl or other apps).

nVidia Geforce FX 5200 (P4 3.2GHz, 512 MB) [1]

  • Do *not* use the exports directed at nvidia cards (made it all sluggish here). Problems I had - Couldn't play any vids, couldn't run ZSNES or MAME.

nVidia Geforce FX 5200 (AMD64 3200+ Venice o/c'd to 2.12ghz, 512 MB DDR 400)

Had an archlinux 7.0 system. Upgraded system and installed XGL from Shadowland's repo and tried to use it with KDE by just replacing one of the 'exec xfce' statements with 'exec startkde' in the file /usr/bin/startxgl and it half way worked. My KDE Splash Screen was just a grey rectangle in the middle of my screen, with weird glitchy graphics that would be the system startup icons and messages. My background and icons were all just as glitchy when KDE started up. The taskbar worked, the menu worked, and they looked great. I could use firefox and xmms, but the glitchy graphics were too bad to handle. I would try and kill kwin, and then KDE locked up, xgl kept running. All the hotkeys for xgl worked the whole time. When I restarted into normal X, all my icons were gone, but the text below them (if it was normally there) was still visible, and that goes for menu's, background, programs, you name it.

I then saved all my important files to another hard drive and downloaded archlinux 7.1 and installed from scratch. I installed the base from FTP and then all the daemons, xorg stuff, network, office, we've all done it. Got all modules working correctly. Shadowland's repo again...edited the /usr/bin/startxgl code again to start kde for me, typed in 'startxgl 0 kde nvidia' at the bash prompt (this wont work for you unless you make a kde section in the file /usr/bin/startxgl) and bam! KDE works flawlessly. I don't have any problems with much of anything. UT2003 doesn't want to work, but I would always bail out of my display manager and just start a raw X for ut2003 anyway, so for me that doesn't matter.

  • Screensavers all work
  • All menu's work well
  • All XGL hotkeys and features work: zoom, spin, expose, fade, etc.
  • All my friends are amazed at my PC now.

I have stress tested with 2 movies playing while xmms was running with 2 visualizations running, what a goom! and synthaesia both enlarged to about 400x400, and everything worked at a good frame rate. I could actually place what a goom! over anything, it has a transparent canvas, so it looked really cool over movies. I moved the cube around with my mouse wile doing all of this, no real drop in framerate. XGL is never too CPU intensive.

Gripes:

  • KDE's built in menu transparency's do not work with XGL as far as I've found, but the panel transparency works better than ever.
  • KDE's menu drop shadows refuse to work well as well.
  • I cannot adjust my nvidia settings with the nvidia-settings program.
  • Not that it ever worked too well with the rest of the system, but KDE's slideshow for a background option seems to kick my system harder now.

Tips:

  • enable the 'show window decorations' in xmms (right click->Options->Preferences->Options tab) for some fun and expect to alt+click to move anything that isn't the main player.
  • Use gl2 video output in mplayer. It's the multiple textures version. It works MUCH bettr than normal gl, and everything else in my opinion.
  • mplayer-plugin doesn't want to work well, so use gxine if it gives you problems.
  • When you start Firefox or Adobe Acrobat 7.0, it takes the geometry of the last size it was when you ran it last, but the window is maximized with a grayed out area. Just click the maximize button and then alt+click to move it, then resize it to fit.

nVidia Geforce 6800(256mb) (AMD64 3200+, 2GB Ram ddr(400), nforce4)(By Omniwolf)

Just installed compiz 8/16/06 from AUR

  • Everything works with gnome and KDE(Using method 2)
  • Video intensive programs are faster now, and I can now open 9 video files at the same time without problems
  • Graphical programs all work fine including google-earth and blender.

- Havent gotten the cgwd advanced windows decos to work yet (they make compiz crash)

- UT2004 shows weird textures, but it doesn't bother me, I ususally run UT2004 in a separate Xsession from WMs and DEs anyway.


ATI

ATI Radeon 9550 (by Saphire)

It works really good, screen is refreshed more quickly than ever before.

ATI Radeon 9600 (by stjepan)

It works great and flawlessly.

ATI Radeon 9600 Pro [2]

It's very snappy and looks good

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

Run well with ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version 8.24.8

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro [3]

Working using Mikos package from the long xgl thread (same results with shadowhand's repo), except:

  • UT2003 won't run
  • Window switcher applet in Gnome is very tiny and only allows me to choose 1 usable workspace (though there are always 4 working)
  • Window scrolling is slow (relative to how it is in normal xserver)
  • Can't successfully exit Gnome (have to use CTRL+ALT+BKSPC)
  • Keyboard shortcuts for "Take Snapshot..." and to use the Gnome menu don't work
  • "fglrxinfo" doesn't work but "fglrxinfo -display :1" does

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro flashed to XT (ASRock 939Dual-Sata2 MBO with ALI chipset) [4]

  • I got shadowhands packages to work easily but only when started from a text console (or within an allready running X session)

ATI Radeon X800 Pro (P4 2.4 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, fglrx) [5]

  • using FoPref's binaries and am using them with XFCE
  • everything works beautifully

Results:

  • XV playback works well
  • Wobbly windows very fast
  • Cube, ALT + TAB and Zoom look great with no problems

Minor problems mentioned already:

  • Firefox scrolls badly with smooth scrolling on
  • VLC windows has no window border (good thing there's XGL's ALT + Drag)
  • XFCE Pager doesn't behave correctly
  • Setup windows can't be moved

Other:

  • XFCE won't close properly, I get dropped into a screen with only a mouse pointer and then the system just idles there until I Ctrl + Alt + Backspace
  • Slight delay between one window losing focus and another gaining it
  • Scale (Expose) works very well for the most part but occasionally windows get placed underneath other windows when it's activated making them harder to click

Some sort of integrated ATI graphics card running ati drivers (P4 1.7 GHz, 768 MB) [6]

  • Get some artifacting on the desktop when using XGL functionality, didn't really put any time into seeing if this could be fixed
  • Wobbly windows still look good but are slow
  • Cube is still very fast

Laptops

Sorting on videocard: from old to new

nVidia

nVidia Geforce 4 MX 4200 Go 64MB (Dell Inspiron 8500, P4M 2,2GHz, 512 MB)

  • I do have problems with screen refresh. Sometimes the cursor disapear, or it leaves some traces, etc.
  • Running at 1920x1200 is ok.
  • The Gnome desktop is really slow to appear (1 to 2 minutes...) but taskbar is working before that.
  • Normally I prefer KDE. I do have problems with keyboard mapping in Gnome and XFCE, whitch I don't have in KDE.
  • Setup/Config window cannot be moved
  • XFCE doesn't close, needs Ctrl+Alt+Del

EDIT: No more problem with a different /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It seemed mine had to much edits in it. I used another one (from the Ubuntu live cd) to create a working one. You can find it at http://nbigaouette.inrs-emt.homelinux.net/linux/xorg.conf.di8500.20060817

nvidia GeForce 7300 Go 256MB (Dell Inspiron 6400, Core Duo 1.8GHz, 1GB ram)

  • Running at 1280x800 perfectly
  • Using it with kde by adding the entry to kdm (option 2)
  • Absolutely everything works even with the -accel xv:pbuffer option

nVidia Geforce Go 7600 512MiB (Zepto Znote 6214w, Core Duo T2400 1.86GHz, 1GiB)

  • Running at native 1280x768.
  • Didn't try it for long - wish compiz was useable like openbox :D - didn't encounter oddities with normal setup


ATI

ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB (Intel Pentium M 1.5 Ghz, 256 MB Ram)

( Questions/Remarks: profoX )

Proprietary driver not available for this card (this card is too old) I wasn't able to install a decent open source driver with DRI enabled. (please let me know if you know more about this!) --> Thanks jzivak! I will try out the information you provided soon, and update this entry <--

With Jzivak's pointer about DRI on this card, I got it to work, but I did it on AIGLX. It works very fast and very good in 24bit at a resolution of 1024x768. Watching videos up to 500x500 works fast. But when you do fullscreen videos it will slow down the other effects like the cube (it will look choppy a little). On 16bit resolution (yes, this is possible with AIGLX) it is twice as fast and I can watch 2 big videos without slowdowns!

Note by another user: As far as I can tell, the driver "xf86-video-ati" works well with this video card. The instructions here to install XGL leave me with just a blocky, unusable desktop though. Probably a configuration problem, as the Kororaa live CD works wonderfully.

Note by another user: It doesn't seem to be stated clearly but the only driver available for the mobility 7500 is the open source ati driver 'xf86-video-ati'. My biggest success storey with this driver was when EXA worked and I was seeing glxgears fps around the 2500 mark. Since then however, EXA stopped working with this driver and I now use XAA.

As mentioned above by another user, AIGLX makes a world of difference. Javascript image transistions within firefox were pushing my cpu to nearly 100% prior to implementing AIGLX. For my complete xorg.conf, see here: http://www.roguewrt.org/blog/archlinux-xorg-conf-on-ibm-r51-ati-radeon-7500

ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 64 MB (Pentium M 2.0 Ghz, 512 MB Ram)

Installed from danimoth's repo, everything works really fast and looks nice. Resizing windows is pretty slow. Cube, zoom, wobbly windows and others works. So does mplayer in fullscreen. I have only tried XGL in Gnome so far.

ATI Mobility Radeon X200m 128 MB (AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHz, 1.5 GB) [7]

I installed XGL via shadowhand's repo. It works solid for about 10min. and then locks up. Working:

  • Cube, Zoom, Alt +Tab, F12, wobbly windows, Mplayer and Xine play video fine.

Not-Working:

  • XFCE + XGL - I type startxgl-xfce and then it goes to a light blue screen, and then it freezes.

Note by profoX: A possible workaround could be to add 2 options to your xorg.conf, please view the section "Troubleshooting - System freeze with ATI Express cards"

Note by polachok: installed beryl from unstable, everything works fine even on 64 Mb in GNOME.

ATI Mobility Radeon X300 64MB (Dell D610, Pentium M 1.73 GHz, 1 GB, fglrx)

Installed compiz-quinn-cvs. Everything is working fast and looks good. Had to add the Radeon workaround in my xorg.conf, see the section "Troubleshooting - System freeze with ATI Express cards". Only tested this under Gnome. Haven't tried mplayer etc yet. Epiphany would not start with the regular Compiz!

ATI Mobility Radeon X700 256MB (Pentium M 2.0 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, fglrx)

( Questions/Remarks: profoX )

  • Shadowhands binary packages:

compiz-quinn-cvs (20060413-1) mesa-xgl-cvs (20060413-1) xgl-cvs (20060413-1)

I had to edit /etc/xorg.conf to avoid a system freeze with my PCI-Express ATI X700:

     Section "Device"
       Identifier  "AtiGraphicsX700"
       Driver      "fglrx"
       Option      "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
       Option      "KernelModuleParm" "agplock=0"
       BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
     EndSection

I had to add those 2 Options to get it working properly

Result:

  • XV playback works
  • All effects work
  • I tried running a game in OpenGL with wine, but all the textures looked really weird
  • VLC works perfectly, but when resizing some parts get "black", this looks stupid, but everything still works ok
  • Xine's control window is just a mass of weird looking lines
  • Most other things work perfectly
  • VLC with XV engine works good, with OpenGL engine the screen stays black for awhile and then I get video, but when I go fullscreen with the OpenGL engine X crashes
  • Going fullscreen with the XV engine in VLC doesn't cover the taskbars of Gnome

ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 128MB (Turion 64 X2 1.6 GHz, 1 GB Ram, fglrx 8.26.18)

( Questions/Remarks: emuranch )

Using Danimoth's packages and an older fglrx (8.27.10 is very slow) everything works fine but is a little glitchy using Switcher and Rotate. This is a problem with my configuration though, because the same system has worked flawlessly with Xgl in other distros.


Intel

Intel GMA900 VGA (MSI S260) [8]

Everything works smoothly, except:

  • Minimizing big windowses
  • Scrolling firefox
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