Documentation volunteer(s) needed

[Holly Bostick]

Oliver Stieber schreef:
> --- Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmx.at> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>>> Oh yeah, another question-- are we making provision for 'special 
>>> circumstances'? I've got an ATI card, which makes me sensitive to
>>> such things, since the ATI drivers fail to do many things that 
>>> they should, and often additional provisions need to be made 
>>> specifically to get an app or game to run with the stupid fglrx 
>>> drivers, where no such config workarounds need to be used with 
>>> nVidia cards, or so I've heard. Or does that just fall under 
>>> 'Troubleshooting'? Or does Wine not need such workarounds at all
>>>  (unlike Cedega)?
>> 
>> There are for sure some cases where fglrx-specific problems exist.
>>  I am hunting two problems with this driver. One thing is that 
>> glTexSubImage2D() and glReadPixels() are HORRIBLY slow, another one
>>  is a crash in the fglrx driver somehow related to textures.
>> 
>> Maybe I can solve these 2 in time, so you don't have to write about
>>  them ;-)
>> 
> 
> You need to turn on backbuffers / backingstore in your xf86config and
>  those two functions were reasonable fast (so long as you don't play
>  mess around with the transfer modes) older driver (can't renember 
> which version)
> 
> Section "Device" Identifier                          "ATI Graphics 
> Adapter" Driver                              "fglrx" ... #    Backing
>  store increases performance when locking the backbuffer Option 
> "backingstore" "true" ... EndSection
> 
> I've got a hack to go into wined3d that speeds up locking the 
> backbuffer by not bothering to read it if it's just been cleared, 
> this get's movies using DirectX and backbuffer locking up to a good 
> frame rate with low CPU usage.
> 

Thank you, Oliver and Stefan! I've changed my config (this option did
appear but was not only commented out, but in the wrong place in the
file, as well as having no value of either true or false). And my
impression is that it being commented is the default setting, but I'm
not sure about that.

I haven't restarted X yet, but it's good to know that this setting has
some function (that's why I think it's commented by default; I certainly
never knew what it did, so I most likely never messed with it), so it
can certainly go into my collection of 'miscellaneous technical notes
that might be useful'.

I hope that it won't be necessary to go into the docs, but you never
know what users might do (if the problems that come up on the user list
are any guide), what Wine they might be using, on what
even-less-supported-than-my-9800SE card (I'm thinking the Mobility
users, and the X*00 users) they might have on their systems. So any and
every little bit of info might be useful to somebody.

Assuming of course that if you successfully hunt down the issue and tell
the ATI team, they don't fix it themselves (which would be lovely,
wouldn't it?). Would save us all a lot of work....

Holly