Slow Rendering and Performance w/ NVidia Card

whatah · n00b Joined: 31 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

Hey, I am having issues with my geforce fx 5500 card. glxgears gives only 1100 - 1300 fps, despite glxinfo claiming direct rendering is enabled. I can't see any obvious problems, I installed nvidia_glx properly and so on. Mesa is not installed, as far as I can tell. I am using iphitus' archck4 patchset on kernel 2.6.14, cpu is an amd athlon 64 3000+.

Thanks.

glxgears:

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

In your kernel, do you have AGP and DRM support enabled? If so, disable it, the NVIDIA driver prefers to do that itself (it's also faster that way). Also, in case you don't need 24bit depth, switch to 16 for higher frame rates. Also, make sure you run glxgears only when there are no background processes running (sometimes my machine has cronjobs that cause framerates to drop from 5500fps down to 300-700fps...); glxgears depends heavily on CPU rather than on GPU, so it's not exactly very suitable for benchmarking rendering only.

whatah · n00b Joined: 31 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

In my kernel, I have agpgart as a module. I am not sure how the agp thing with nvidia works, but I think I still have to load agpgart but instead of loading amd64_agp, I load nvidia-agp with it. I did this and enabled it in my xorg.conf as well as dropped the default depth to 16. I now get around 1950 FPS in glxgears. With the other agp driver, I was receiving between 1800 - 1900 FPS. I don't have drm, enabled, it's also a module, but it doesn't seem to be loading at all. Should drm be loaded with the nvidia card ever?

As for benchmarking, I tried running enemy-territory at 1024x768 in timedemo and it only rendered at 24 fps, I think that's kind of low.

Thanks,
whatah

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

I don't know about amd64, but on my Athlon-XP, I just disabled the AGP/DRM stuff in the kernel, and got a speed gain from it. Other than that, I have no idea how to improve this frame rate of yours. It's possible you're suffering from another problem that I don't know about.

whig · l33t Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 973 Location: New Zealand

(Pardon silly question) if your video card takes a power cable is it plugged in firmly?

whatah · n00b Joined: 31 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

I can't think of any other problem, but I am going to be trying to obtain another video card for comparison, thanks for the help.

As for the card itself, I don't think there is a power cable attached to it.

SuperDindon · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 01 Sep 2005 Posts: 125

Yep DRM should be disabled

But i think it's preferable to use in-kernel agpgart driver ( strange that ATI and nVidia still include their own AGPGart code, their Windows drivers don't do that )

Quote us the output of :

gaminggeek · Posted: Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:07 am Post subject:

That sounds about right, the 5XXX series at the low end was average at best and a 5500 isnt the best 5XXX card out there.

My 5600 gets

whatah · n00b Joined: 31 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

Ah, I see.

I was confused about how good my video card was. I think I will look for a better one. Thanks.

t0mcat · Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 3:05 pm Post subject:

tbh agpgart nvidia driver sucks, use the nvidia internal agp one. my geforce6800 does 300fps with agpgart and 11000 with nvidia.

to check wich driver is currently used just do

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

whatah · n00b Joined: 31 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

I had originally assumed this and when I tested my computer without DRI, the FPS dropped drastically. With my ATI cards, the CPU was not going up to 100%, so I believe you may be right in what you are saying. If you find out more about this, please let me know.

gaminggeek · Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 6:47 pm Post subject:

No, I'm sorry I have the same problem there are other things to calculate when a game or opengl app os working my advise to you is stop fussing and your card isnt broken thats just how it is. Although if you do find a fix I would be interested but I don't think you will.
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

Well, before anyone can find a fix, you'd have to investigate the problem. You could do this by running an as simple as possible OpenGL application that produces the problem (take one from the OpenGL programming tutorial that does nothing but draw a white rectangle on a black screen or something, dunno if this will cause high CPU load though). And then check and see where the CPU is being (ab)used. Debug tools like strace, gdb, ... may help here, as well as adding debug messages to the opengl program directly.

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

Okay, I've fixed the issue... sorta.

After installing the drivers directly from nvidia, and then switching to the xorg-x11 opengl interface (which I'm thinking is actually using nvidia glx, as the 'standard' glx location is where the official nvidia installer would install to, not the dir that gentoo throws it into...), 3d games such as neverball run great, with virtually zero cpu usage. things such as turning on vsync in nvidia-settings actually has an effect on glxgears now as well.

So, I think my guess as to what the problem is has switched very squarely to how gentoo installs and handles the nvidia glx drivers, likely from the eselect change... but, it works for me now, so I don't care to go into it that much deeper anytime soon.
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drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

For the record.... something still wasn't quite right... 3d stuff worked great, but when I tried to use mythtv (which uses open-vsync to time the video apparently) it maxed out my cpu and still couldn't quite play... I decided mythtv is a lot more important to me than 3d games are, so I've gone through all the trouble of reverting back, so 3d is again not working.
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africa · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 17 Location: ger

sim0nx · n00b Joined: 30 Nov 2003 Posts: 22

pfffffff
I got exactly the same problem. I've been searching all over the net for a solution, but without luck so far.
I tried tons of different configurations, went from modular x to mono. x ... from 6.8.x to 6.9 and back etc...different driver versions
Nothing helped.

glxinfo + X.log all show that everything "should" be working fine. But it's not.
using nvidia glx libs, I get about 4000fps in glxgears.
using mesa, I get +/- the same.

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

sim0nx · n00b Joined: 30 Nov 2003 Posts: 22

mtoups · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 57

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

sim0nx · n00b Joined: 30 Nov 2003 Posts: 22

I didn't change that vsync option.
I've tried several driver versions...no change to glxgears.

I was also posting on the nvnews forum, and somebody tried to convince me glxgears is not a benchmarking tool (I knkew that) and that it might give you strange values.
I couldn't believe it because I know what I got before.

Anyway, I just tried halflife2 yesterday, with _everything_ set to maximum (incl. FSAA + anisotropic) at a res. of 1280x1024, and the game was smooth as always.
So I guess my graphics card is working fine even though glxgears suggests something different (glxgears: 4000fps max; cpu=100%).

If somebody could explain me why glxgears gives me 4000fps no matter how I configure my system, where before I got >10000fps .. ?
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mtoups · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 57

In spite of the note regarding verions in my earlier post, I am using the 1.0.8178 driver, but I must disable the opengl vsync option. My guess is that if you need that option, you will need to go to an earlier kernel. My use flags are: