I experience significant performance loss with ubuntu 8.10 alpha 3 with my Intel DG965WH based system and SVDO/ADD2 video card. Actually, the performance loss started with ubuntu 8.04.1; I upgraded to see if there was any performance gain with the new version. While "glxgears" produced values between 1580 fps and 1496 fps with ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, respectively, now I can only achieve something like 445 fps with ubuntu 8.10 alpha 3. I get an error message when starting glxgears that "TTM" was not available and classic mode would be used. Similary, the flight simulator "flightgear" achieves frames rates of 1-2 fps only.
My suspicion is that some of the hardware acceleration features of the X3000 system are not being used, and I don't know how to activate them with the new xorg.conf structure and the underlying automatic configuration approach.
I would like to see the graphics performance go back to the values achieved in ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10.
Your help / comment is greatly appreciated.
Bingo
[Update]
Intel upstream has been in a multi-year effort to rearchitect X and the Intel 2D and 3D driver to provide better performance. While this work is underway, people are seeing variations in performance levels from version to version, for a variety of reasons. There are probably multiple unrelated bugs being reported in the comments here.
It is important to note and remember that glxgears is *not* a benchmark tool. It simply measures how fast the driver writes images to the screen, whereas most 3D applications are limited by render speed, not merely blit speed. Instead use a 3D game (flightgear, tremulous, etc.) that has a real rendering workload to make comparisons.
If you're definitely seeing performance problems and are able to narrow it to a specific cause, please do not comment onto this bug report - it's too lengthy and rambling already, and your issue will just be lost in the noise. Instead, make a new report and please be as specific as possible with exact steps to reproduce and as much detail and logs as you can. See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Reporting for tips on making a good X bug report.
A troubleshooting guide, with additional background about performance issues on Intel is available at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance
Same problem here, with an intel x3100 card (on a Samsung Q45).
Up to 8.04.1 (Kubuntu) I was able to use KDE4 'desktop effects' easily.
Also, sInce upgrading to 8.10 Alpha 3 (from 8.04.1), desktop effects are not working, enabling them results in a mainly black, garbled screen.