[plug] Snappy UI

[Craig Ringer]

Onno Benschop wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-06-13 at 09:24, William Kenworthy wrote:
> 
>>This leaves tuning the system software?  What kernel and desktop (I
>>deleted the rest of the thread and cant remember if you mentioned them?)
> 
> Ok, before I get into kernels and gnome/kde, window managers etc. I
> figure that the next thing is to determine if my machine supports video
> acceleration, and if I'm using it.

It _does_ support accelerated video according to your specs. As for 
whether you're using it - you will be unless you're either using the 
VESA driver or have a NoAccel command in your XF86Config.

Alas, XFree86 does not support RENDER acceleration on your hardware (or 
any hardware with the XF86 built-in drivers) so you're still likely to 
find text rendering to be inferior. Hopefully this problem will improve 
in the Xorg tree, as some people do seem to be interested in working on it.

> I don't know how to determine my current video depth.

xdpyinfo | grep 'depth of root window'

> I'm sure I'd be happy with 16 bit colour, if I'm not already running
> that, but I'd need some guidance on determining the correct bits to
> tweak. Perhaps even 8bit would be fine most of the time, I'd like to
> test.

Almost no LCDs can do true 32bit anyway, and AFAIK sometimes support 
less then 16 bit colour. So you may as well. That said, it shouldn't 
make much difference on a modern video chipset - I haven't found the bit 
depth to make any noticeable difference.

> I'm also not sure how I'd determine if I'm using the correct video
> driver, if there are others, etc.

Hmm. That brings something to mind. If there's any chance you're using 
the VESA video driver, that'd explain a lot of your performance 
problems. It's apallingly slow, but generic and works with most cards.

$ grep Driver /etc/X11/XF86Config*

if you see a line like:

	Driver	"vesa"

it'd be a really good idea to back up your XF86Config then reconfigure X 
to use the i810 driver. This may be as simple as changing
	Driver "vesa"
to
	Driver "i810"
... and that's probably worth a try, since I assume you'd be comfortable 
dropping back to the console and tweaking things if problems developed, yes?

--
Craig Ringer