How to get blazing fast compiz on ATI r200/hp nx7000 and get faster gnome menues

While there are lots of tutorials how to get those nifty compiz effects working, I never got my notebook playing nice and fast along it. As I prefer OSS drivers the only viable way wa AIGLX which never did work as well as XGL on my hardware.
This changed today. After playing around with my graphics card config, those were the settings that made a compiz-enabled gnome as fast as the normal one.

Edit the graphics card section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI Radeon R250 Lf [Radeon Mobility    9000 M9]”
Driver “radeon”
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps”
Option “backingstore” “true”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “AGPSize” “64″
Option “DynamicClocks” “on”
Option “mtrr” “on”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “ColorTiling” “true”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

Get the whole xorg.conf here.

The only thing that makes my computer unstable was enabling “AGPFastWrite”, so I let it turned off. If this still is to slow for you, disable “subpixel rendering” or turn the color depth back to 16bit.
Another annoying thing is the gnome-menu popup speed. I always thought that it’s slowness was caused by a slow icon cache, but alas! it was caused by the gnome developers inserting a .25 second pause before opening windows. I do not know why.

To turn it off, just add the following to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0

In your face, Vista.

No related posts.