Nvidia Driver And 2.5.70

kirsan · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 11

The set of patches that emerge puts on the nvidia kernel driver for 2.5.70 (and my guess would be for .69 too) is broken. It appears to be the agp patch.

If I do an 'emerge nvidia-kernel', the driver that gets installed gets around half the performance that it has in the past (and I've tested this with ut2003 benchmarks, not with silly old glxgears). It appears to be the agp patch, as a cat /proc/drivers/nvidia/status with an emerge'd nvidia driver gives "Status: disabled." So my guess would be that patch breaks agp support, and I was getting PCI-type scores.

The fix, for the moment, seems to be ignoring the nvidia driver in the portage tree, and just applying the freshest www.minion.de patch myself and installing. That brings performance back up to a level that matches 2.4.20-gentoo-r5, and the benchmark scores I remember getting.

rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

the latest nvidia 4363 drivers work together with 2.5.70 without patching ...

nvidia-kernel-1.0.4363-r2 & nvidia-glx-1.0.4363

running pretty stable and fast with 2.5.70-mm3 ...
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sgaap · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2003 11:14 pm Post subject:

Apolonius · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2003 Posts: 325

To enable agp support with nvidia drivers and 2.5.70, don't forget to load the specific agp module of your chipset. For instance, i have an amd761 agp controler, so i had to compile the kernel module amd-k7-agp. When i modprobe amd-k7-agp, agpgart is automatically loaded. Then startx loads the nvidia module and agp is enabled.

kirsan · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 11

I haven't tried using an unpatched nvidia driver with a 2.5 kernel in a long time. In the past, they haven't compiled.

In this case, the problem I was reporting is that an "emerge nvidia-kernel" with vanilla 2.5.70 gets you a driver with broken agp support.

I don't need to load agp modules, I've got agpgart compiled in (my kernels are usually fairly monolithic). Have for a long time. It was never a problem (that I noticed anyway) till 2.5.70 came out. It could've started in .69, I don't know, and haven't tested. I didn't notice until I started playing Enemy Territory and realized I was getting about half the performance that my machine should be capable of for a Quake3 engine game.

The agp patch that portage applies to the driver is what seems to break agp support. Latest minion.de patch + 4363 = properly working, stable goodness.

sgaap · Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2003 10:10 pm Post subject:

I had even better performance (1000 fps more with glxgears) when using the nvidia agp instead of agpgart, it had some stability issues with older nvidia drivers but it runs rock solid now

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kirsan · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 11

Yeah. I've been trying to get NvAGP to take. Every once in a while I'll get it working, then break something and it'll go back to using Agpgart, and I almost always forget what it was I did to get it working.

However, choosing NvAGP definitely doesn't make a difference when your driver thinks AGP is disabled/non-existent :wink:

segflaunt · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 May 2003 Posts: 101

That's funny, Gentoo was the first dist on which NvAGP worked for me!