[Bug-gnubg] Abysmal 3d performance with radeon driver

[Dario Niedermann]

Hello,

when I used GnuBG (source-SNAPSHOT-20090501) on Slackware 12.2 with
ATI's proprietary driver (fglrx), 3d performance wasn't great, but still
acceptable.

Now I upgraded to Slackware64 13.37, where X11 uses the open source
'radeon' driver. DRI is enabled, and demos like `glxgears` run smoothly.
But GnuBG's (gnubg-source-SNAPSHOT-20110326) 3d performance is abysmal
(the built-in test reports 0.2--0.3 FPS).

I also tried the oldest downloadable GnuBG snapshot, but it too performs
badly.

The GtkGlExt library is installed, and `ldd` reports that `gnubg` is
linked to it.

What could be at fault here? I know my humble graphics card (ATI Radeon
200M) can do much better than this, and the open source driver seems to
work decently enough. GnuBG's 3d graphics wouldn't seem very demanding,
so I really wonder how it can be so sluggish.

Thanks for your thoughts.