Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Intel 945/965 mobile with Compiz

For ones that have just upgraded to Fedora 9 with the new Xorg 1.5 (actually 1.4.99 at the time this is posted), compiz performance may be a big problem on Intel 945/965 mobile cards. Fedora 9 was shipped with Xorg 1.5 which is too new and this makes Fedora 9 much more a bleeding edge release than ever.

The well known 'i810' driver in Xorg 1.3 is now deprecated and is shipped as a sym-link to the 'intel' experimental driver in the new Xorg. This resulted in a situation that there is only one way for you to run a 945/965 card with Fedora 9: use the experimental driver. And, this is not good.

The experimental 'intel' driver provides a very bad performance when working with Compiz in its default setting mode. I haved tried to enable the Desktop Effect with no errors but Firefox scrolling perfomance dropped down badly.

I am really disappointed with the way Fedora 9 is shipped with the brand new Xorg. Users with Intel cards have bad compiz performance; Users with Nvidia cards have only a 2D driver with no compiz at all, no 3D game at all (even when using livna). Who else can benefit the new Xorg?!?

I'm still waiting for the new updates from Fedora to have all Intel card problems fixed. The Fedora team has worked really hard to bring Sulphur to life. However, a little bit more efforts for fixing the Intel problems will be deeply appreciated :-x

For the time being, I have temporarily fixed to compiz performance by switching the acceleration mothod of the 'intel' driver to its old XAA mode. This makes Firefox scrolling performance acceptable when using it under Compiz.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
EndSection

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