I have some more information on this after some trial & error. I hope someone can narrow down the problem and suggest a fix. I tested the open source radeon driver. After much configuration, I got it working, but it was VERY slow. While running F@H through wine, I got 600fps in glxgears vs. 2200fps with fglrx. However, it was pretty smooth. Unfortunately, 2D acceleration was no better and it was a pain just to move or minimize windows with compositing enabled. It is not usable for me yet. I can't be 100% sure, but the stuttering seemed gone or less with the open source driver. There were so many choppy and slow effects that it's really hard to say though. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was when I ran glxgears after switching back to fglrx to benchmark the difference. While running glxgears, the stuttering was drastically worsened. The gears looked very choppy. Every time the gears stopped, so did my whole system - including the mouse. Stopping F@H through wine eliminated all stuttering and glxgears ran at 5200fps. Does this prove the problem is with the fglrx driver? My tests with the open source driver and with DRI disabled were inconclusive. Or is wine to blame somehow? Running F@H through wine is the only thing that causes this problem. Is there any way that wine could be exposing a flaw in another area?
