Howto: Fix Performance of ATI Drivers with Compiz on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
Everyone know's that ATI drivers always seem to have something wrong with them, be it tearing in video or just general slow performance.
I happen to be victim to both of these currently, the way I got around video tearing was by changing my video output as I outlined in my previous tutorial, Howto:Fix ATI Video Playback. As for the performance issues I've finally found the answer! It turns out that it's got something to do with backfill we don't need to know what it is or what it does, all you need to know is getting rid of it fixes performance issues such as slow maximizing windows and also should fix video tearing!
Caution: I'd like to warn you in advance that doing anything with xserver could make your system unstable and crash you desktop interface. So do this at your own risk!
Step 1
Go to System->Administration->Software Sources, navigate to the Other Software tab and click Add... and paste in this text:
ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill
Click Add Source and then Close and it will update your package list.
Note: This is a Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala tutorial if you are using older version add the appropriate source from here
Step 2
Now go to System->Administration->Update Manager and you should see two new updates for xserver-common and xserver-xorg-core if not Check for updates. Then install said updates.
Once done give your PC a quick restart and you should see it has now fixed your problem.
Note: You can also do this from the Terminal by running:
sudo apt-get update && upgrade
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January 25th, 2010 - 07:27
Worked Great For Me, Thanks,
Dell Studio 1735
ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3600
Ubunto 910
Linux Std17 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:05:01 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
January 26th, 2010 - 16:10
my issue with ATI drivers is more than just performance issues, actually suspend/resume does not work in my laptop (w/ ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650). Is there a known workaround to fix this problem?
January 26th, 2010 - 20:22
I did a quick search and I found this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7431520
It seems the easiest thing to do would be to install the most recent ATI drivers from AMD support page:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
Best of luck!
February 5th, 2010 - 12:28
Did it for my Lenovo laptop W500 equipped with ATI.
Wonderful. Problem is fixed.
Thanks a lot for the information
Olivier
February 6th, 2010 - 14:57
Works great for my T400!
Thanx a lot!
tombalabomba
February 8th, 2010 - 15:23
It works! I have been looking for the answer since yesterday, thank you so much!
February 10th, 2010 - 23:19
I did this with Karmic on an HD 4650 and after restarting I can’t boot into Ubuntu anymore
February 11th, 2010 - 18:16
You should boot into recovery mode and delete your xorg config file.
February 13th, 2010 - 02:16
To Daniel
I suspect your problem will be the same as I had…after installing as per this guide I had to reinstall the ATi drivers, but in honestly I have just upgraded the Kernel prior to install
ryan@desktop-bro:~$ uname -a
Linux desktop-bro 2.6.31-19-generic #56-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 28 01:26:53 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
Basically I dropped into rescue mode from the grub menu, said drop to a shell with networking (not needed really unless you have to download the ATi driver again).
Then simply ran
sh ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run (or whatever version u run)
followed the automatic / basic install, reboot then all go again
But in my case I suspect it was due to updated Kernel, although I did reboot after the Kernel update with no issues THEN installed the above,
other commands you can try from rescue mode if that does not work are;
aticonfig –initial -f (reinstall should more or less do that though)
dpkg-reconfigure xorg (unsure of specifics of what that will do)
Try the ATi driver reinstall and let me know how you get on
Regards
Stretch
February 15th, 2010 - 20:57
Thanks a lot
Worked for my HD 4650
Previously Desctop Effects would not enable. Now Compiz works completely.
February 16th, 2010 - 13:16
Finally!! It works perfectly on my laptop ASUS PRO58Sseries equipped with an ATI HD 3650! Thanks! =)
February 19th, 2010 - 09:57
hey guys .. i am using a dell studio and it has a ati hd 4500 series i did install the drivers and all was working well .. but i had 1 major problem i was not able to resize the windows and sometimes my monitor just blinks and all the woobly feature goes off and i have restart my system to make thing work …
thx in advance
February 25th, 2010 - 19:15
thanks ..it works with my ATI HD 4850… n_n …
but i still have one problem..tearing wooble windows with compiz enabled..
March 10th, 2010 - 08:12
Worked Perfectly on IBM thinkpad T400
March 10th, 2010 - 09:46
Look out, it’s the only solution I also found for this tedious problem of ATI drivers, but it should have a drawback: memory keeping on filling up everytime you open/close a window.
You could restart compiz, log-off, restart or open a 3D software (GoogleEarth?) to free the memory.
…if I didn’t misunderstood this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1306527
Goodbye to all of you
March 10th, 2010 - 09:48
..oh well, didn’t ‘misunderstand’!
March 15th, 2010 - 12:39
works like a charm. My PC has never been fatser and snappier
Thanks for the tip.
March 18th, 2010 - 14:00
Hi! This works great on Ubuntu 9.10! Thank you so much! However, I want to switch to Mint, or Lucid Lynx (10.04) and how do I do this then? The ppa is for Karmic?
Thanks!
March 18th, 2010 - 14:09
Glad it helped you out. I really wouldn’t recommend using 10.04 on a production machine, it’s just going into Beta 1 today. That said I’m pretty sure that you can use ppa’s that are for older distros. As for mint, I haven’t got a clue.
If you want to try 10.04 just install testdrive it’s got a ppa and everything. Works with Virtualbox and kvm.
Hope that helps.
March 18th, 2010 - 14:27
Ok, too late
I i’m installing Lucid right now..I’ll try it, someone said to me that it’s pretty stable already…but maybe that’s wrong?
Is it possible that the driver works out-of-the-box with Lucid? Thank for the quick answer!
March 18th, 2010 - 14:31
Lucid is using a new version of X.org which isn’t supported by the most recent ATI driver, so in short, probably not.
I did try Lucid out on my ATI laptop and the open source drive was working pretty well, but that was Alpha 3 when I tried it, so it can only be getting better now.
April 30th, 2010 - 09:38
Guys get lucid and stay with opensource driver it’s better than offical ati drivers the new opensource drivers have video acceleration and best compiz compatibility .
May 1st, 2010 - 05:27
I 100% agree, lucid’s open source drivers are amazing out of the box, work with compiz effects without any tweaking. Just great!
May 3rd, 2010 - 19:48
I have a problem again. Whenever I try to watch a video on YouTube, or any site that uses flash, my computer shuts down by itself. it can happen after 2 minutes, or 10 minutes. It’s only happening when watching videos.
Currently using Lucid Lynx LTS. Open source ATI drivers. Please help!
May 3rd, 2010 - 21:40
I suggest you file a bug on launchpad straight away, that’s a pretty bad bug.
The only thing I can think of would be to uninstall flash and reinstall it. Hope that works for you.
June 30th, 2010 - 03:31
@oyvindAre you sure your system isn't overheating, that can cause this to happen. If you can check your temps.
June 30th, 2010 - 03:48
does this work on lucid, you said it will for previous versions with link but not the new version