I have an x1650 agp 256mb (rv535 chip). This was a "problem" card from start, as it is "unsupported" by ati because of the AGP interface... No matter what I did I could not get the proprietary driver to work. It always ended in black after installing. I tried for about a week straight every day....I decided to use the radeonhd driver (no 3d...yet), which is open source and it worked really well for 2d. Then came along May of this year -> major advancements in the open source driver "ATI (radeon)". Because of a major release of 3d documentation form AMD/ATI to the open source community, the progress is in leaps and bounds.
I followed this article:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9951
I am able to run compiz uber-smooth, it never breaks 3d, and I get over 2300fps in glxgears, which is on par if not better than people are getting w/ the
PCI-E version of this card using fglrx (proprietary driver)
Your card is of the same family (RV500 series) and will most likely work better with the newest open source driver!!
I hope this helps you, because I struggled with this issue (ati drivers) for months. I even considered getting an nvidia card, but now that I have 3d using open source drivers I couldn't be happier.
There are however some features that are not fully developed yet.
BTW are you using "LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT" when starting Compiz?
This is the way I start compiz, so I don't have any problems:
Code:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz --replace ccp & exit
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