:: choice ::

random good link:
No TCPA

random evil link:
Microsoft

random quote:
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing left to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

New Nvidia Beta driver: KDE4 flies, but has stability issues.

Last night Nvidia released a new beta version of their binary driver. This one has some new features, where especially a couple of RENDER pathes are now hardware accelerated. I've installed the driver on my desktop machine on a rather clean OpenSuse 11 and a 7600GS and tweaked it to enable to new feature that aren't on by default in this release (but are planned to switch on for the real deal). The performance problems I've had with switching desktop and apps are totally gone and KDE4 is flying like I've never seen it before. Switching tabs in Firefox is still slow, Konqi does it swiftly. I've set the following options in my xorg.conf. My Device section now looks like this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device[0]"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVidia"
    BoardName      "GeForec 7600GS"
    Option         "RenderAccel" "true"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
    Option         "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"
EndSection

And the Screens section:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen[0]"
    Device         "Device[0]"
    Monitor        "Monitor[0]"
    Option "PixmapCacheSize" "20000000"
    Option "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Modes      "default"
    EndSubSection
    [...]
EndSection

(AllowSHMPixmap probably only has to go into one of those, but it doesn't seem to hurt as other issues are more pressing right now. When I resize a konsole window too quickly, the machine locks up. I'm not sure if this is a driver problem indeed, or a hardware problem (I've not used the machine much lately, and lockups happened with earlier versions of that driver as well.)
Something which I find rather strange is that I cannot run nvidia-settings:

ERROR: The control display is undefined;
please run `nvidia-settings --help` for usage information.

So assumably I'm getting only part of the performance improvements. I'm asked if anybody knows why, up until now to no avail.
Overall I'm very positive about this release. It finally seems that we can deliver a really swift KDE4 experience also to those users with insanely fast graphics cards (insanely fast at least for the graphics features we use in KDE). I'd suggest those that have been suffering from performance problems (and anyone else using 7xxx or above Nvidia series graphics cards to try this driver. Don't forget to change your xorg.conf and enable the Gyphcache and PixmapPlacement hacks. I've also updated the techbase page with this information to make it easier to find.

Update: After some fiddling, I've got everything to work. The nvidia-settings issue was a local config problem, the lockups are only present when I forget to run nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1. I'm a happy camper now. :-)

Update: There's an even newer version of the beta driver available, try this one instead of the .68 or .69 version of the driver as it fixes a couple of problems with the beta driver and it's just more likely to work.

[ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:25:21 +0200 ] permanent link

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