HOWTO: Making your windows look super sweet in Hoary (compositing)

[tlepes]

I am having no luck with the ATI card using the latest ATI drivers in Ubuntu/Hoary repositories. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128Mb video SDRAM. My system is an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (nForce 350 chipset) with an AMD Athalon 64 3000+ running 32-bit Hoary 5.04.

$ uname --all
Linux alembic 2.6.10-5-386 #1 Tue Apr 5 12:12:40 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

The xcompmgr reports version 1.1.1.

Now the compositing works (using the word loosely). Problem is that it is painfully slow, and very buggy. It misses big chunks. It has problems updating elements. Like, for instance, if I open Firefox and use the transset command to make it 50% transparent it will SEEM to work at first. But if you scroll the page, the new parts stay opaque. Also, as you mouse over widgets, they goof up. It also has problems with one window getting the image of another (overlain) window stuck on it. This is far from workable.

HOWEVER, I think it may have something to do with this... When I enable the compositing, it seems that my 3D acceleration and all goes out the window. I am back to MESA. I don't have a clip of that for you, but on the OpenGL lines of fglrxinfo output I get MESA. With the compositing disabled, I get this...

$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9800 Pro Generic
OpenGL version string: 1.3.4769 (X4.3.0-8.8.25)

Now the only difference in my configuration is whether I enable the Compositing Extensions or not.

$ diff xorg.conf xorg.conf~
57,59c57,59
< Section "Extensions"
<       Option "Composite" "Enable"
< EndSection
---
> #Section "Extensions"
> #     Option "Composite" "Enable"
> #EndSection

Things that make ya go #!$#@^%$#...

For what it's worth, I found in the Xorg.0.log file that the following is not understood by the ATI fglrx driver (it gives messages to that effect)...

	Option 		"RenderAccel" 		"true"
	Option 		"AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

But this one seems to be recognized okay...

	Option		"BackingStore"		"true"

I would really like to have the compositing. I am certain that my machine is physically capable of handling it just fine. I guess I'll have to ride this out until it gets developed a little further along.

- Tim

[Jesus Franco]

According to those using the nVidia driver, the app works perfectly fine. And in a beefy system it runs at full speed.

So to my understanding its the ati drivers. Not the xorg compositing thing. I also have a Ati video card. A AIW 9800 Pro. I have used these settings and run into the same problems as stated above

ATI plz fix it.

Are there any alternatives to the ati fglrx drivers? For example on windows theres the official ATI ones, the Omega ones and a few others. Are there any FGLRX alternatives for linux?

[ConstableRoark]

Jesus Franco, those windows drivers you refer to are based off official ATi releases.

[poofyhairguy]

I would really like to have the compositing.

How much do you want it? I found it worth it to toss my 9600 pro in a drawer and buy a cheap Nvidia card. It is the only solution as of now.

I am certain that my machine is physically capable of handling it just fine. I guess I'll have to ride this out until it gets developed a little further along.

- Tim

You might ride for a few years and get nothing. After A LOT of complaining ATI has finally started to improve the 3D of their drivers a little. At the rate they went, it will take a long time before the company adds composite (2D) support I imagine.

[poofyhairguy]

Are there any alternatives to the ati fglrx drivers? For example on windows theres the official ATI ones, the Omega ones and a few others. Are there any FGLRX alternatives for linux?

Well, the MESA drivers will do the drop shadows. But if you want compositing, its buy a Nvidia card or bust.

[msgyrd]

Just reporting my mileage with this.
Running a 1.4ghz AMD, with a GeForce2 PCI 64 mb card with 256 mb system mem, also running Hoary/Gnome and everything is updated.
The howto worked flawlessly for me, but my system couldn't handle the fade in/fade out effects very well. They rendered fine, but framerate/refresh rate seemed to drop to about 15fps and was very choppy (but the effect did look cool). I have shadows enabled still and don't notice them affecting anything (I don't use screensavers and havn't ran any opengl applications yet, so nothing to report there).

This summer when I install Ubuntu on my better system, I'll try this on my (much newer) ATI card.

[Tobi Vollebregt]

I tried it too; it looks super-ultra sweet and the HOWTO is just perfect. Unfortunately this composite manager freezes my system at random if I enable shadows. I'm now testing how it performs with only translucent windows. I'm looking forward to the moment this thing is perfectly stable.

The performance is really good for me (even with everything enabled, bad thing that it freezes even before logon is finished) - might be because my videocard is kinda oversized for my system: Amd Duron 800 Mhz, 384 Mb RAM, nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4200

glxgears even seems to gain 50-100 fps (3000 ==> 3050-3100) from it (just translucency).

[echoz]

True for the dx9 card issue.

Mine dies on shadows.

2.4c p4
1gb ddr ram
gf4ti4800se

[Tobi Vollebregt]

I've disabled it: xcompmgr without arguments (ie. only translucency) sometimes randomly restarts X and that's quite frustrating if you have lots of windows open.

[poofyhairguy]

True for the dx9 card issue.

Mine dies on shadows.

2.4c p4
1gb ddr ram
gf4ti4800se

All the evidence supports it.