Degraded X performance in 7.0

[Ben Kaduk]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 1:49 PM,  <george+freebsd at m5p.com> wrote:
> Between FreeBSD 6.2 and FreeBSD 7.0, something has happened with
> performance.  Using a generic 6.2 kernel and the X server which
> shipped with it, and mplayer built with the defaults from ports,
> I would play a movie from an NFS-mounted disk, with mplayer using
> roughly 30% of the CPU time and xorg less than 5%.  On the very same
> hardware upgraded to a generic 7.0 kernel and the X server which
> shipped with it, and mplayer built with the defaults from ports,
> playing the same movie from the same NFS-mounted disk, mplayer
> still takes roughly 30% of the CPU, but xorg is taking 35-40% of
> the CPU!  The quality of the playback is noticeably rough.  What
> should I be looking for?  The diff between an old Xorg.0.log and
> a new one is pretty massive.  I have an ATI Technologies Inc Rage
> XL AGP 2X rev 39, Mem @ 0xce000000/24, 0xcfeff000/12, I/O @ 0x8800/8,
> BIOS @ 0xcfec0000/17 according to the log.
>

It sounds like your graphics card isn't doing as much work as it should.
Could you post the results of dmesg and your Xorg.0.log somewhere
accessible?  It would be best if versions before and after the upgrade
were available.

-Ben Kaduk