XFCE 4 Accelerated Graphics Issues

[GoldenMouse]

I just switched over to XFCE from Gnome, but now everything that uses accelerated graphics has issues. Specifically, games will either fail to start at all or be extremely choppy while running, then crash X when exiting. OpenGL screensavers end up simply being choppy.

None of this happened while I was running Gnome, and nothing seemed to have changed when I commented out the "Extensions" section of xorg.conf and the line enabling AIGLX. Does anyone know what's going on?

[nordic bro]

A couple things. First these are just shots in the dark. Second I haven't used gnome in years so don't know what it's capable of graphically now and what settings it may/may not require in xorg.conf. IOW, settings which could drastically affect xfce may have no impact on gnome (I"m just guessing) so your xorg.conf could be messed up. Last, I'm using latest nvidia drivers and xorg7.1 and until a couple months ago was using xfce4.? with no problems using the accel graphics features (and beryl on top of that).

If you're using nvidia and xorg7.2+ IIRC I read that nvidia can enable some accelerated graphics thing(s) without having to explicitly say so in xorg.conf. So to disable whatever, you'd want to explicitly set it/them to off/false in xorg.conf. This could explain why you saw no changes when removing/commenting those things out. Check the readme in /usr/share/docs. I'm not positive about which of these may/may not affect you because I read it awhile back.

When you mentioned low fps, I remember that when I was experimenting at some point when I enabled 'Options "Composite" "Enable"' my fps dropped through the floor; the note I made in my xorg.conf isn't too clear so I'm not sure how I got fps back up. The only options I currently have set in xorg.conf are 'Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"' in device section and 'Option "Composite" "Enable"' in the extensions section and that's it. Maybe there's a clue here to whatever settings you're trying. If you want I'll look in the log and see what else nvidia is enabling itself.

Last is that for some things (like beep-media-player for me to use "double size") I have to start it using this:

[GoldenMouse]

I'm betting it's the NVIDIA problem that you noted. I _am_ using the NVIDIA proprietary (yuck) drivers with a recent build of X. I'm looking through for stuff on that right now.

[nordic bro]

My post was pretty long so what you could try is set only

[GoldenMouse]

Maybe I should have posted this to begin with. I'm not too savvy when it comes to X and its configuration. The only things that were done to it were to move from nv to nvidia, then to add AIGLX. If need be, I can live without AIGLX for the time being. Of note is that I'm stuck using old nvidia drivers, since they dropped support for the fourth generation. That then forced me to freeze X at 7.2, since the older nvidia drivers don't work with 7.3. I'm wishing that nouveau would hurry up, so I could switch away from this proprietary blob.

[nordic bro]

Sorry, didn't realize that. The only thing I know about older cards/options is what is in my old xorg.conf and xf86config files but I don't know the state of my hardware/drivers for any of those entries to suggest anything helpful. I did give your conf file the once over and don't see anything glaringly obvious.

What you'll probably want to do is look through the readme in /usr/share/docs/nvidia*. 99.9% can be ignored but somewhere in there you will probably get the setting(s) you need. If you do find some things, it's better to test with too few options than too many FYI so add one by one. I searched my readme for "aiglx" and nothing returns so I don't know if that's a synonym for a setting I referenced, a setting only for older cards or a setting you have to look outside nv docs to run. I'm using nvidia-drivers-100.14.09 and xorg7.1 if it matters.

Sometimes it's useful to go line by line through /var/log/Xorg.N.log for nvidia-related msgs that you can adjust xorg.conf for. I've never had to do that myself but it is a second source to see what's going on when X is started and which may be leading to later problems.

If you hadn't already, you can also check /var/log/messages when one of those bumpy games tries to run and see if anything there helps; check ~/.xsession-errors too and you can also bump up logging verbosity often by changing /etc/syslog.conf (or whichever controls your logging facility). You can also try 'grep -ir <game name> /home/*' and maybe you'll stumble on some output that explains what's the matter with them (or at least something to google).

I've also been assuming the problem isn't with xfce which it may turn out to be so don't discount that. It would be nice if there was a wiki that specifically addressed your problem (which there could be) but short of that I would start by going through the nvidia readme.

[GoldenMouse]

I appreciate the help. School is setting a furious pace, else I'd be working on this a little more actively. Sanity should return late next week. Until then, I'll be a little slow on this. So, thanks for helping out.

I'll look through those docs and see if Google has anything interesting, then post back when I get a chance, likely in a day or so.

[GoldenMouse]

Updates:

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True" does have an effect, of sorts. Before, glxgears would perform slowly and be choppy, yet report normal framerates (500fps). With that option set, glxgears looks just fine for a couple of seconds before resuming that other behavior.

Setting that CLI option before running glxgears had no effect.

So, something's still broken, but your suggestion seemed to be onto something.

[nordic bro]

Sorry, just now seeing your last reply.

At least you're moving fwd a little; if glxgears starts out ok then craps out that's a pretty good clue - I don't know what it means but it's a good clue I do remember though that when I use "zoom desktop" in beryl while running glxgears it goes to crap - did you just sit there and watch it go down or did you do something on your desktop that might've slowed it down? Or I wonder if there's some other nvidia option your setup is going to require? Maybe you could search the nvidia forums and find something? Or google glxgears for others that saw that happen.

The XLIB* thing isn't needed except for probably just a few apps of a certain kind but for those few it's definitely needed. Did you try starting one of the problem games using that? Just to see if that at least fixes the game part of your problem?

[widremann]

Make sure the XFCE compositor is disabled. Go to a terminal and execute killall xfwm4 && xfwm4 --compositor=off and see if your problems don't go away.