A week into the ATI experiment

So I was sick of the crashes in the NVidia driver. Nouveau wasn’t that good. Maybe someday it will be, but its really not that useful to me. So I opted for an ATI W5000 card. Initial install was rocky. The card used VESA drivers, and that was fine for initial boot. Accelerated drivers … didn’t. They were slower than the VESA drivers. Window movements were jerky. It felt … wrong … somehow. Ok. Google my problems, and I find this obscure reference to a problem I should not be having. The fixes are below for /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and they go in the device section.

### tuning c.f. http://www.linuxinsight.com/your-ati-radeon-very-slow-on-xorg-x-server-1.3.html
### tuning
    Identifier  "amdcccle-Device[134]-0"
    Driver      "fglrx"
    Option	    "AccelMethod" "EXA"
    Option	    "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
    Option	    "AccelDFS" "true"
    Option	    "EnablePageFlip" "true"
    Option	    "EnableDepthMoves" "true"
###
    Option	    "GLXVBlank" "True"
###

After this, everything worked nicely. Once the two HP displays was underscanned, so I fixed it with the GUI tool. Now I’ve got a dual monitor accelerated Linux rig for day to day use. VirtualBox and other tools are nice and fast on it (some SSD goodness within it). A little storage … like 6TB of RAID10 … as well. So all in all, I’d rate the ATI as being an OK experience so far. A little rocky to get started, but once it was up, it was stable, especially in comparison with the NVidia stuff. Now of course, I still have the Mac Mini on the desk, and that is sharing the monitor and keyboard/mouse/audio/USB via a StarTech 2 port dual DVI USB KVM switch. So I can switch back and forth with ease.