Here are my specs to my computer to get that out of the way:
Acer Aspire 1642WMLi Laptop
Pentium M 1.73 MHz
1.2 GB
i915 Chipset
Okay, even with the latest update to mesa (6.5.3v8) I'm getting terrible performance with anything that involves graphics. Similar situations and apps that are ran on Windows give no performance troubles at all. Here's some examples of situations that yield poor peformance:
-Screensavers
-Any type of visualizations in Multimedia apps
-Flash videos
-Any other type of videos, DVD, Mpeg, QT (though not as bad)
-Games, even simple ones like 3Dchess that wouldn't generally be considering taxing on the comp
-Even glxgears causes trouble
What happens in any of these situations is that my CPU shoots up to an outrageous % thus causing the CPU temps to rise and make my fan run CONSTANTLY...It never seems to cease until I end the program or stop watching a flash video. I'm not saying that nothing multimedia-wise works on my comp, because 99% of it works! But it's frustrating to have to use CPUfreq just to lower my settings (798Mhz) so I can watch a video. My glxgears output is about an avg. 800 fps...which seems low to me. I can't believe there aren't others who are having this same problem seeing how the i915 chipset seems like a popular chipset. I'm not sure what's the culprit here...is it OpenGL? or Mesa? or perhaps the xorg drivers (BTW I'm using xserver-xorg-i810)...
Any help or solutions would be welcomed, because causing my fan to run constantly with definitely shorten the lifetime of my lappy.
You say you are using xserver-xorg-i810 ... do you have Driver "i810" in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf ?