Hi all,
My machine configuration is as follows
P4, 1.6GHz, Sony vaio desktop with 512 MB Ram and Nvidia TNT2 Video
Card.
I am running both Redhat 9 and debian woody unstable. I have 2.4.20
kernel for redhat and 2.6.1 kernel for debian.
Till 2.4.20 i was happy because the "nv" driver provided by xfree gave
a performance of 220 fps (with the help of glxgears) and when i
install binary driver from nvidia it will go upto 287 fps.
Even though it looks smaller when i read some mails in which people
claim that they get 1000 fps or something like that, but i was happy
to see some difference in the fps between the xfree driver and
original driver provided by the card manufacturer.
Back to the problem, after i installed 2.6.1 in debian first i had
some problem in installing nvidia binary because it complained about
the modversions.h file and sometime later i found about the patch from
http:://www.minion.de and used them and installed them as per their
instructions, i.e., the debian way of make-kpkg.
Now the nvidia driver gives me just 60 fps with the new kernel and
nvidia binary driver, whereas the xfree driver still gives me 220 fps.
If i go back to rh9 and check, nvidia driver gives 290 fps. FYI i use
current nvidia driver 5336.

thanks

jc

jayachandran kamaraj wrote:
Have you tried the latest drivers from Nvidia? These claim to support
2.6 ...

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On Mon, 02 Feb 2004 06:02:38 -0800, jayachandran kamaraj wrote:


I am not if the info spit out by glxgears is all that reliable. In my
system, glxgears reports some 180 fps with the XFree86 nv driver. However
when I use the 5336 nvidia driver from Nvidia it drops to a very
disappointing 50 fps. Indeed, if you look at the gears they seem to spin
much faster with the nv driver.

As it happens, if I use the 4496 nvidia driver then glxgears reports some
400 fps - which is much more satisfactory. However, the gears STILL seem
to spin much slower than with the XFree86 driver. Just as slow, in fact,
as with the 5336 driver.

I decided to test the whole setup finally with the GLX molecule
application, to be found packaged with xscreensaver. This application can
be invoked to report the fps performance, and is extremely
graphics-intensive. The results here were inambiguous: not only do both
4496 and 5336 drivers results in a much higher performance, as far as the
reported fps count is concerned (about 3 times as many fps as the XFree86
nv driver, on average), but, in addition, the molecules animation can be
clearly seen to be much smoother.

I do not know what is the matter with my glxgears, but I just don't trust
it any more. By the way, I am using 2.4.20 and 2.4.22 kernels in Slackware
9.1. My CPU is an old 1 GHz Athlon, in a VIA VT8363 motherboard.

At earth time Mon, 02 Feb 2004 06:02:38 -0800, the following transmission was received from the entity known as jayachandran kamaraj:

I've been getting occasional total lockups which seem to be related to my
nvidia card - often happens if I kill X the wrong way, and it never used
to be a problem before i got that card. One problem with nvidia is
(last i heard) they don't release the card specs or release the
drivers under a free license, so you're stuck with what they're offering
if there's a problem.

I'm just downloading the latest driver, so i'll see if that's any better.

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At earth time Mon, 02 Feb 2004 06:02:38 -0800, the following transmission
was received from the entity known as jayachandran kamaraj:

I've been getting system lockups, probably caused by the nvidia graphics
driver (RIVA TNT2 64 card). The crashes all seem to be from doing
something with X, like a ctrl-alt-backspace GUI shutdown, so I think it's
that. I've just installed the latest driver to see if its any better.
Maybe it will work OK, but I'm not impressed with it:

- now I'm getting a 2 second nvidia logo flash screen whenever i start X.
- the driver is released as binary only, and is a generic one for all
nvidia cards, so the kernel module and XFree86 drivers are huge (1.9 M and
559 K).
- they don't release the card specs either, from what i last heard, so
no-one can write an free driver.

altogether I'll give them a miss in the future.

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At earth time Mon, 02 Feb 2004 22:54:25 +0000, the following transmission
was received from the entity known as Andy Baxter:

got it running - there's now an annoying nvidia logo flash screen when i
start X, and it won't run more than one X server at the same time.
Altogether I think i'll avoid them in future.

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At earth time Tue, 03 Feb 2004 00:16:35 +0000, the following transmission
was received from the entity known as Andy Baxter:

managed to get rid of the logo (but not the flash screen) with the
following shell script:


#!/bin/bash
# removes logo from nv driver startup flash screen.
echo "patching nv driver"
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
if [ `md5sum nvidia_drv.o | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -f1 '-d '` != "dae9d62191112964743224569b7daebb" ] ; then
echo "driver md5sum doesn't match - exiting"
exit
fi
cp nvidia_drv.o nvidia_drv.o.old
dd if=nvidia_drv.o of=/tmp/nvdrv1 bs=1 count=`printf "%d" 0x6a990`
dd if=nvidia_drv.o of=/tmp/nvdrv2 bs=1 skip=`printf "%d" 0x6d6bc`
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/nvdrvzero bs=1 count=$(( `printf "%d" 0x6d6bc` - `printf "%d" 0x6a990`))
cat /tmp/nvdrv1 /tmp/nvdrvzero /tmp/nvdrv2 > nvidia_drv.o
rm /tmp/nvdrv*
echo "done"


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Andy Baxter wrote:

Sometimes it helps to read the documentation.

From <ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-5336/README>

__________________________________________________ ________________________

(app-d) APPENDIX D: XF86CONFIG OPTIONS
__________________________________________________ ________________________

The following driver options are supported by the NVIDIA XFree86 driver:

..skip...

Option "NoLogo" "boolean"
Disable drawing of the NVIDIA logo splash screen at
X startup. Default: the logo is drawn.

Andy Baxter wrote:
Easily fixable.


Yes it will: "X :1" work fine for me.


Yes, that might be wise.


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Hi,


Which kernel version are you using? 2.4.18 has a definite bug in the AGP
handling that can create lookups on graphics.

RTFM.

That's huge?

So long,
Thomas

At earth time Tue, 03 Feb 2004 09:10:46 +0000, the following transmission
was received from the entity known as Paul Black:

done it.

on mine, it exits with 'can't allocate ...' (I'd have to do it again to
remember the error msg, and last time the whole machine hung instead , so
i won't)

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At earth time Tue, 03 Feb 2004 09:20:41 +0000, the following transmission
was received from the entity known as Thomas Richter:

2.4.22.

found it.

seems so, considering that the nv driver which comes with xfree86 is 75K
and doesn't load a kernel module or driver library, and the new one is
559K, and loads a 1.9M kernel module (bigger than my bz compressed kernel
image), but it doesn't make the system any faster. altogether that's about
as big as the whole of alsa, including all the drivers i'm not using.

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it seems that my problem of lower fps wasn't experienced by others.
Because i can even stand the nvidia logo during startup because i was
aware of how to avoid it, but let it be there as i was lazy. but what
i can't stand was the lower fps.

jc
Andy Baxter <news4@earthsong.null.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.02.03.00.09.08.760695@earthsong.nul l.free-online.co.uk>...

jayachandran kamaraj said:

I'm getting about 65 fps with mine, so i guess we have the same problem.
nvidia have a web forum on their site, so you could post there and ask? I
think I'm going to get a new graphics card some time.

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that's why i ordered a new graphics card yesterday. but it is still
nvidia. because when it comes to linux, almost all manufacturers
follow the same rule. provide binaries, not the source code. so i
decided to continue with the nvidia but a better one
jc
Andy Baxter <news4@earthsong.null.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.02.03.19.09.11.869502@earthsong.nul l.free-online.co.uk>...