467458 - Poor performance related to recent ATI 3xxx drivers, Windows XP

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: GFX: Win32, defect)

Description

[Thomas Rutter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

Scrolling and general rendering, including changing tabs, is very slow and jerky when using ATI Catalyst drivers (eg, version 8.10) in Windows XP on an ATI Radeon 3100, HD3200 and similar.

This is probably the fault of the Catalyst drivers, but filing this anyway as suggested at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=807075
I wasn't sure where to file this.

Reducing Windows XP acceleration is a workaround to the problem as follows:

"Tick the hardware accelaration of your hd 3200 from "max" 1 step to left.
"cursor and bitmapaccelaration off" appears."  Confirmed this behaviour on my own computer - scrolling is significantly smoother and the whole UI is more responsive.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to frames/graphics/plugin heavy web page (such as http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060704195516AAnrdOD)
2. Scroll up and down or switch tabs
Actual Results:  
Slow, jerky responsiveness even on brand new dual core computer.

Expected Results:  
Performance as smooth as when hardware acceleration is reduced as described above.

Comment 1

[Thomas Rutter]

This problem is resolved for me after updating to ATI Catalyst driver version 	 9.4, released April 8 2009.