After a bit more experimentation, perhaps my workstation has another year to it after all, in contrast to my earlier evaluation of my workstations’ obsolescence. My basic complaint revolved around being unable to run many bittorrent downloads while watching a video.
Linux has long had problems with drivers for “cutting edge” hardware, like the latest video cards. In tinkering with my installation of Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy), I finally concluded that for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro:
- ATI driver (fglrx) v8.42 gives good GL performance (as measured by
glxgearsandfgl_glgears), and terriblemplayerperformance. - ATI driver (fglrx) v8.40 gives bad GL performance and good
mplayerperformance.
I also noticed that using gmplayer, the GTK front-end mplayer, instead of the command line mplayer directly, used about double the CPU (30% v 15%). I use the command line version now.
Further analysis yielded that using the GUI version of bittornado used about 10% CPU per application instance (which is also per torrent due to the bittornado design). Running the console version of the same application yielded about 1% CPU usage. I ended up switching to deluge, which is a lighter application that provides comparable functionality and hosts all downloads in a single application instance (at ~2% CPU).
Watching HD videos is actually possible now!
