RE: Text scroll is very low at any terminal program

["Mike A. Harris" <mharris www linux org uk>]

On Tue, 13 May 2003, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:

>>>I have a enough powerful video card ati radeon VE and
>>>text scroll is very low at any console program(konsole,gnome term, xterm)
>>>at redhat 7.3 it is ok. is it fontconfig problem/feature(another layer more) ??
>
>>------- Additional Comments From mharris redhat com  2003-04-28 04:59 -------
>> Since almost everything uses Xft and the Render extension for rendering now,
>> and since the RENDER extension is not accelerated, RENDER options are
>> unaccelerated.  While it would be nice to have it accelerated, that won't
>> happen until someone implements RENDER acceleration for Radeon upstream.
>
>It looks like the "bug" is not a XFree problem. rhl 9 kernel-2.4.20-9 has a lower
>performance than rhl 7.3 kernel-2.4.18-24.7.x.

I wouldn't consider it a bug at all period.  Performance is 
something that can be improved upon in software, not something 
broken that requires fixing.

While you may or may not see performance improvements or 
degradation from changing kernels, that is a complete side issue.  
Xft rendered fonts are not accelerated, and until they are, there 
is a performance bottleneck created when using applications that 
use Xft.

>I changed Xfree console programs fonts to 'miscfixed bold 15'(the old 10x20) and
>speed is normal. At other X programs It doesn't mind to me.

You've changed fonts to a fixed font, and the speed is now 
normal.  That is in tune with what I am saying above, as a lot 
of the codepaths used by antialiased scaleable fonts are _not_ 
used in misc fixed.  Thus a performance increase.  Has nothing to 
do with the kernel whatsoever.


>And a question: Is AGPMode an automatic setting?

The AGPMode setting either should not ever be used by the end 
user, or it *MUST* match the AGP mode that your BIOS has 
programmed the AGP chipset to at boot time.  If you set AGPMode 
randomly, then you are likely to experience system lockups and 
other problems.  Also, AGPMode has no effect on 2D graphics 
performance.


-- 
Mike A. Harris