Optimizing video on ubuntu

I'd like to get better performance out of my video cards. I have nvidia and ati cards in systems. The default drivers from Ubuntu work just fine, but if I can get better video playback or GoogleEarth performance, I think I need to try using closed binary drivers.

This link looks like the most helpful documentation I've seen for this process: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Video

Background

The current state of affairs is that my nvidia machine will run GoogleEarth and play video. The ati machine will not run GoogleEarth and it sometimes stutters on video. Also, I'd like to know how to generate an xorg.conf file since I blew mine away at one point to recover from a failed driver installation.

merkli

rday@merkli:/var/log$ lspci | grep VGA
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc R350 AH [Radeon 9800]
rday@merkli:/var/log$ lsmod | grep radeon
radeon                636000  2 
ttm                    36212  1 radeon
drm                   159584  4 radeon,ttm
i2c_algo_bit            5760  1 radeon

The preferred method of installing the binary ATI driver is via the package manager, but that doesn't work in Jaunty:

JAUNTY NOTICE
      The above Jaunty 9.04 instructions don't actually work because the latest ATI driver is incompatible with 
XOrg 1.6. To see a guide on instructing how to downgrade XOrg and install the ATI driver, view this link:

      http://tan-com.com/posts/technology/fix-ubuntu-904-ati-driver-issue

I don't really want to downgrade my Xorg for this.

The other option is to install the driver directly from ATI, but I found the documentation to be pretty old. It mentioned Dapper Drake...

Ahah, perhaps I should try again after seeing this in the news:

AMD Releases New ATI Drivers
Dec 21, 2009

AMD has issued an update of its proprietary 3D drivers for the current ATI cards. Version 9.12 fixes a number of 
bugs for multi-monitor mode and enhanced the Catalyst Control Center.

The new 9.12 release provides numerous new features, first among them improvements to the ATI Catalyst Control 
Center, which now stores the user settings after an X Server restart. It also allows user adjustment of the 
resolution, which was previouly only available through root privileges. AMD also reworked the TV settings dialog 
and added the S-video/composite image sharpness setting.

Download of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is now available. Release notes are also provided in a PDF document. 

Somehow the supported platforms for the new driver does not include the Radeon 9800. How is that? They support desktop cards from Radeon 2400 to Radeon 5900. That's not even close. The only driver they provide for linux for the 9800 is the legacy driver and that is incompatible with Jaunty. So I'm out of luck. I'm not sure if I can use this as a reason to hate ATI, but I think it counts.

weasel

rday@weasel:/var/log/landscape$ lspci | grep VGA
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G71 [GeForce 7300 GS] (rev a1)
rday@weasel:/var/log/landscape$ lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia              10316904  36 

rday@weasel:/var/log/landscape$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load    "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Default Device"
        Driver  "nvidia"
        Option  "NoLogo"        "True"
EndSection

OK, so the nvidia machine is already running the closed binary driver. Not much to do there.