OpenGL apps randomly hitching

[Jengu]

On my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000 w/ Rage 128 Mobility) I get hitching in any opengl apps. That is, it's smooth for a few seconds, then freezes for a second, then it's smooth for a few seconds, then it freezes again. Everything else works fine and glxinfo | grep "render" reports that DRM is on. I'm not even sure where to begin where to look. The problem shows up even in glxgears so I'm pretty sure it's isolated to opengl.

More recently, I started having the same problem on my much more updated desktop (XP3000+ w/ Radeon 9700 Pro). Games are smooth, then freeze, smooth, then freeze. I recently added a few more services to it (sshd and monit) and followed some threads on updating boottime, but I can't think of any changes that would've effected opengl. I think this maybe a separate problem from the laptop though -- the laptop DRM has never worked properly since installing gentoo while the desktop's has in the past. I'm running the 3.14.6 drivers on the desktop which worked fine before, and I've tried reemerging them to no luck.

Any ideas?

[Archangel1]

What WM are you using? I've seen a similar issue in KDE, which goes away in an empty Fluxbox on the same machine.

[Jengu]

I'm using fluxbox 0.9.10 on both machines actually :/

[Jengu]

More fiddling with the inspiron still hasn't worked. I was using a xorg.conf from back when I tried Yoper, started a new one with Xorg -configure and only tweaked it a little bit (added sync and refresh rates, and the dri mode section) and the problem still shows up, even in 640x480. I noticed glxinfo was reporting my AGPMode as 1x, so I set it to 4x in xorg.conf.

That worked, but the hitching still occurs even in just plain glxgears. I tried fiddling with making /dev/agpgart built-in versus module and rage128 graphics support build-in versus module in my kernel config, but changing either breaks the framebuffer console so that the screen freezes and starts flashing

Anyone have anything else I can try?

[Jengu]

Fixed the problem on the desktop: Lisa was using 98% of the cpu! No idea why. So if anyone else has this problem: run top and see if any programs are using obscene amounts of cpu. wmacpi was the culprit on the laptop. No idea why it was constantly sucking so much cpu.