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Installing catalyst drivers

Hi everyone,

I recently installed Artix on a ThinkPad X200 and also installed some xorg packages to run my forks of dwm, st etc. along with it. Everything seemed fine until the moment I tried to test the video rendering w/ cmatrix: it starts lagging abnormously in about 5 seconds. Somewhere online I read about some people having the same issue, which was apparently related to having installed the xf86-video-intel drivers and were solved by installing the catalyst drivers. Such topics redirect to this page in the Arch wiki which should give instructions on how to setup the catalyst drivers, but seems to be archived and no longer accessible. Do anyone have some ideas on how to solve this? :)

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #1 –
The Catalyst drivers? Are you sure? Those were old AMD proprietary drivers that were terribly broken and have long been abandoned since AMD thankfully rewrote their drivers from scratch (amdgpu). Anyways as far as I know, the ThinkPad X200 only has intel graphics so there's not really anything you can do about poor 3D performance.

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #2 –
community/cmatrix 2.0-2
    A curses-based scrolling 'Matrix'-like screen
That cmatrix? If you have problems with that, can you even scroll in less?  ;D  I was thinking when I read that it would be some gl 3d thing... surely even a 2008 C2D machine ought to cope with some scrolling green letters.
But anyway, this page
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X200
suggests this:
System feels unresponsive
If your system feels unresponsive and lagging, you can try creating a file called /etc/modprobe.d/drm_kms.conf:
options drm_kms_helper poll=N

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Dudemanguy – on
The Catalyst drivers? Are you sure? Those were old AMD proprietary drivers that were terribly broken and have long been abandoned since AMD thankfully rewrote their drivers from scratch (amdgpu). Anyways as far as I know, the ThinkPad X200 only has intel graphics so there's not really anything you can do about poor 3D performance.

Yes! I cannot find the exact reference anymore, but some people specifically claimed everything became buttery-smooth as soon as they switched to the catalyst drivers.

Quote from: ####### – on
community/cmatrix 2.0-2
    A curses-based scrolling 'Matrix'-like screen
That cmatrix? If you have problems with that, can you even scroll in less?  ;D  I was thinking when I read that it would be some gl 3d thing... surely even a 2008 C2D machine ought to cope with some scrolling green letters.

Yes, that cmatrix  :D really nothing strictly necessary, I just implement it in my script which locks the screen after suspend, because I like it.

Quote from: ####### – on
But anyway, this page
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X200
suggests this:
System feels unresponsive
If your system feels unresponsive and lagging, you can try creating a file called /etc/modprobe.d/drm_kms.conf:
options drm_kms_helper poll=N

Thank you, but unfortunately that didn't fix the issue with cmatrix. However, I just tried installing all the 3D visualization software that I need, and surprisingly they run without a glitch. I wasn't expecting that after seeing lagging with cmatrix only. I guess this "solves"my issue in some way :')

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #4 –
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/ArchWiki:Archive&limit=500
(ctrl F search catalyst)
also from one of those pages:
https://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page
But will it run here or would you need some old Devuan etc. edition to provide older software?
And anyway, as Dudemanguy said, looks like it has Intel X4500 Integrated Graphics so AMD drivers are useless...
 I think debugging the current issue first might be better, look at top, see what process is causing the issue, sometimes window managers have compositing which can be turned on or off, try swapping stuff about, perhaps give some older kernels a go, and try to isolate what's causing the problem, it might be more of a desktop / userspace bug, who knows.

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #5 –
This message comes up when installing the intel driver - it's something else that can be adjusted, and can apparently be relevant for rendering issues on ATI & Nvidia too. No idea if it's helpful here though!
Code: [Select]
 installing xf86-video-intel 
>>> This driver now uses DRI3 as the default Direct Rendering
    Infrastructure. You can try falling back to DRI2 if you run
    into trouble. To do so, save a file with the following 
    content as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf :
      Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "DRI" "2"             # DRI3 is now default 
        #Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna" # default
        #Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa" # fallback
      EndSection

Re: Installing catalyst drivers

Reply #6 –
Sorry for not replying to this thread in such a long time. I tried inspecting htop and could not identify the actual issue. Also, on my other machines (which run a pretty similar setup) there were no such issues.

In the end, I simply ignored the problem. Then, when I re-installed the system with the linux-hardened kernel in order to fully-encrypt the disk, the problem was gone. So it was likely kernel-related, or due to some other diabolical mumbo-jumbo which I could not identify. Marking as solved