[Ardour-Users] ardour 4 // slow graphical interface

[Chris Caudle]

On Fri, April 24, 2015 4:49 pm, Neil wrote:
> One of the reasons I bought the laptop I did was that I thought there were
> good free and open drivers for that family of video card [ATI/AMD]

Is the new Ardour graphic code using OpenGL for 2D acceleration?  There
has been a lot of work on that in the last couple of years, and the newest
AMD [nee ATI] cards apparently will only support OpenGL accelerated 2D
operation, so if you don't have the GLAMOR extensions working and you have
one of those cards, the 2D operations fall back to software rendered.  
Unfortunately there is usually a significant lag between new capabilities
in the X and Mesa drivers and the time those updates get into a
distribution.

This article has a comparison between the old 2D Mesa code, the new GLAMOR
code, and the proprietary Catalyst driver:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-xorg-117&num=1

That is with x.org X version 1.17, which may not be available in your
distribution.  I run Fedora, which usually stays pretty up to date, and
the latest release has 1.16.  The beta for the next release (22) just came
out, and it has 1.17 in the repositories, so Fedora users will be able to
use 1.17 and Mesa 10.5.0 next month.  Extrapolate accordingly based on the
release schedule for your favorite distribution.

-- 
Chris Caudle