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Using HyperZ on Radeon to boost performance on Ubuntu

This is a very good tip for anyone with a Ati Graphic Card on Ubuntu

Today I was trying to give a bust to meu ATI 9200, using the OpenSource Drivers “Radeon”. But even so, with my actual config I was only getting a average of 1100 FPS.

So search on ubuntuforums and the web I stumbled upon a package named “driconf“.

This application allows to change some configs of the DRI (that gives the 3D accelaration). One of the options available is ” Use HyperZ to boost performance“, and guess what, it really does! I now have a average of 3500 FPS! And with Beryl active I get 2000 FPS, much more than before, so it feels much smoother

So, what is HyperZ?? Wikipedia told me this:

HyperZ is the name of a set of computer graphics processing techniques used by ATI Technologies in their Radeon video cards.

On the Radeon R100-based cores, Radeon DDR through 7500, where HyperZ debuted, ATI claimed a 20% improvement in overall rendering efficiency. They stated that with HyperZ, Radeon could be said to offer 1.5 Gigatexels per second fillrate performance instead of the card’s apparent theoretical rate of 1.2 Gigatexels. In testing it was shown that HyperZ did indeed offer a tangible performance improvement that allowed the less endowed Radeon to keep up with the less efficient GeForce 2 GTS.

This should work with all Ati cards from 7000 to the 9700 using the OpenSource Drivers.

$ sudo apt-get install driconf

$ driconf

Note : Run driconf has normal user, don’t use sudo.

My Device Section in Xorg.conf:

Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 [Mobility 9200]”
Driver “radeon”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “AGPFastWrite” “true”
Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “true”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true”
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

More Info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperZ

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/