Thinkpads Forum

it's time for a new laptop, and one little problem has been bugging me -- reports of horrible fglrx drivers for the T60p firegl. Some reported worse performance than VESA, not being able to keep it stable for an hour, etc.

Quite simply, are there new drivers? Are the bugs ironed out? It's either that or a x1400

fglrx works fine, and I suspect its about the same speed as ordinary X1xxx series.

I get the following fps in fgl_glxgears running 1600x1200@60hz using
ati-driver 8.32.5:
I get following fps with maximized window in 1600x1200:
I use a T60p (2007-93g) on (K)ubuntu Edgy 6.10/KDE 3.5.5a, and the fglrx is compiled by me.

FireGL V5200/256mb, and 2.16ghz Core Duo.

do you play any games? if so, do they "work" or is it clear that the 3d accell is not up to snuff?

Not benchmarks, just impressions

Also, anyone know if there's a difference in drivers between the two firegl?

I've played the Open FPS games, Nexuiz ; Sauerbraten (sound like something you eat).

They work fine, giving good FPS in 1280x1024. 1600x1200 seemed choppy (~20fps) in the most advanced one - sauerbraten I think.

To say it shortly, the FireGL behaves like a normal radeon - I never notice or encounter problems that its infact a FireGL card.

Everything works, but would have liked to have a Nvidia Go7xxx because their drivers are more mature overall.

Fglrx has improved very much the past year or so, and I have no lockups using it. Last lockup was on kernel 2.6.10 or something - thats a while ago

I use vmware quite extensively and besides bugs in vmware, fglrx behaves nicely (and fast).

However someone told me that the opensource version of radeon can run equally as fast in 2D as the propriatery drivers does, but I haven't been bothered to test it. Ofcourse 3D wouldn't work in that configuration.

Hope it answers some of your questions

Edit: I havent tested the "correct" firegl drivers because they seem rather stuck in time (read: old), and support is very sparse ... remember ATI's linux drivers are provided as-is, with little or no support (Yeah I know thats just not very serious commitment). Hope that'll change over time.

I just ran fgl_glxgears while waiting for a big ftp to finish, so the following numbers are somewhat lower than they should be as the machine was already working hard:

Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
2458 frames in 5.0 seconds = 491.600 FPS
2854 frames in 5.0 seconds = 570.800 FPS
2965 frames in 5.0 seconds = 593.000 FPS
2953 frames in 5.0 seconds = 590.600 FPS
2938 frames in 5.0 seconds = 587.600 FPS
1779 frames in 5.0 seconds = 355.800 FPS
1125 frames in 5.0 seconds = 225.000 FPS
1107 frames in 5.0 seconds = 221.400 FPS
1118 frames in 5.0 seconds = 223.600 FPS
1122 frames in 5.0 seconds = 224.400 FPS
1109 frames in 5.0 seconds = 221.800 FPS

The dip about halfway through was caused by me maximising the window.

This is 1400x1050, 2.33GHz 2Gb memory, 5250. Debian etch (ie latest version of debian testing) with fglgrx built last week.

i have a t60p with a t7200 and 1 gig of ram in 2 512 sticks. the fglrx drivers are not nearly as good in terms of performance in comparison to the windows drivers. that being said they're still alright, it really depends on the games you play.

i'm not much of a pc gamer, i was at one point additiced to counter strike but that was several years ago, now i can't stand fps' (except metroid prime and tron 2 ) but for the games i like to play it's perfect. everything runs flawlessly (games like rrootage, tumiki fighters, neverball, gltron, cave story via wine and emulators like fceu, zsnes, mednafen, sdlmame). i also run xgl/compiz with gnome and it's very stable, haven't had a single problem with it.

i picked up the demo of doom 3 for both linux and windows tried both. it's hard to give what my fps was in each, as it tended to jump around in both, but i believe it averaged at around 60 for windows, and 30-40 for linux. under linux the frame rate jumped around a lot more, some rooms it would be great, others really jumpy. but for the most part the game was playable if not sometimes choppy. i was playing at 1024x768 at medium quality with all the items in the advanced options turned on. also i found lowering or raising the quality just barely affected the games performance at all and i couldn't see a difference in quality between any of the settings. also lowering the res to 640x480 helped the most, giving me at least 10 extra fps most of the time, it made the game feel much smoother as well. but still, playing the game at this res and at low quality was like playing the game in windows at 1024x768 with ultra quality in terms of smoothness/consistent framerate.

on the plus side the loading times were much faster on linux..

edit:
i forgot to mention i have the t60p with the firegl v5250. also i played the game again in linux today and it seems to be a lot more choppy than i remembered, especially when fighting the demons, drops into the 20's, and if there are >= 3 enemies 15 fps (and this is at 640x480 res at med quality)
finally if you haven't seen it already here's a review of the latest fglrx drivers, they used the t60 with an x1400 as their test machine.