I had read some people trying new ATI Catalyst driver 8.12 (8.561-6.8.12.fc10) about weeks ago, until an hour ago, I finally tried it out. I am glad that I tried.

The steps are easy, you just follow leigh123@linux’s instruction, but for the first step, I actually did:


yum --enablerepo=rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing install akmod-fglrx xorg-x11-drv-fglrx xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs.i386 xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs.x86_64

I installed this new driver along with kernel 2.6.27.7-134.fc10.x86_64, here is some results to check out:


% glxinfo | head -5
name of display: :0.0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2

% fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8304 Release

% glxgears
10959 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2191.728 FPS

% fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
2326 frames in 5.0 seconds = 465.200 FPS

Then, I tried on kernel 2.6.27.9-159.fc10.x86_64, resulted:


% glxgears
11390 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2275.998 FPS

% fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
2451 frames in 5.0 seconds = 490.200 FPS

The numbers are better. However there is a big problem from 159 for some models of Dell’s laptop. No audio output through headphone, in my case, it’s Dell Inspiron 6400! This bug report has a few comments about kernel 2.6.28, so I downloaded 2.6.28-4 from Koji. That does work, but I seem to have keyboard issues, I couldn’t use Alt+F1 or Alt+F2 to the main menu or bring up run dialog in GNOME.

If you don’t know how to upgrade kernel from other than YUM repository, you can do:


# Find out what you should download
yum list kernel-*
# Download the packages
su
yum --nogpgcheck localinstall kernel-*.rpm

The most significate improvement is Woopra, I have complained about that. But now, after installed this new ATI driver, Woopra runs much faster.