[utah-glx-users] Very slow performance on ATI Rage Pro PCI 8MB (Xpert 98)

[Ingles, R. <Ray...@fa...>]

 I'm putting together a Frankenstein machine out of spare parts
for a demo next month. The hardware involved:

 Asus TX97-E Motherboard
 Cyrix Pentium, 100MHz ("PR133")
 64MB RAM
 ATI Xpert 98 PCI
 TI Thunderlan (100bT) Ethernet
 Adaptec 1542B (ISA) SCSI card
 4GB SCSI drive
 SoundBlaster AWE 32

 I've installed SUSE 6.4 and their utah-glx packages. Sadly,
performance is not what I'd hoped. In Windows, glquake is playable
(haven't measured framerate yet) but it's hopeless in Linux. I get
around .1fps (yes, about a frame every ten seconds). When I run
"gears", at the default window size, I get ~25fps. Yes, I'm running
as root. Yes, I did the LILO mem hack and reserved 4MB for DMA.
Yes, I disabled the font and pixmap cache.

 I know that the CPU is pretty slow, but I'd expected a *little*
better than this. One irritating thing is that I can't seem to get
hw_boxes to work, so I can't establish the status of the DMA. I did
note something in the log that implied it was getting a DMA
bandwidth of about 66MB/s, so I think DMA is at least present.

 Am I an idiot for trying to get 3D with only a Cyrix P-100? I have
an Intel P-100 I could pop in there if it would help noticeably. What
kind of framerates can I reasonably hope to see? What can I try to
speed things up? I have a 3/28/2000 glx rpm that I will try to
install tonight.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles          (248) 377-7735         ray...@fa...

 "The meek can *have* the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!"
                        - Robert A. Heinlein