4.1.99 slow

[Mark Houlder]

> yep, as you've guessed, it's composite that's causing the slowness.  
> frankly, i'm not too pleased that the compositor is enabled by default 
> in xfwm4 in the gentoo ebuilds.  then again, composite is disabled by 
> default in the x.org config, so if you're enabling it, you should know 
> what you're doing (hint, hint ^_~).  the real bottleneck here is 
> actually the video drivers' implementation of the X render extension, 
> which often isn't all that great.  from what i understand, the nvidia 
> binary drivers are the only ones that have a half-decent render 
> implementation, and it only really helps on the mid- to upper-range 
> geforce cards (at least, it sucks on my ancient tnt2 ultra).


yes, you're right, i enabled the compositor in my xorg config, to play 
around with it when i upgraded to the latest xorg. at that time there 
was no point turning it off (from my point of view) as i still had to 
explicitly use transset etc to make use of it. now that it's starting to 
be used inside apps i may as well turn it off in my xorg.conf.

am i right in understanding that my being able to use it (without it 
being sluggish) will be down to new versions of the ati kernel drivers 
(i have a radeon card and use the kernel drivers for it rather than the 
ati ones)? or is it likely to always be slow on my hardware (radeon 9000 
mobile w/ 32mb). it's no biggie, but the drop shadows look so nice ... :)