Comments on: NVIDIA Drivers First Look

By: _foreskin

_foreskin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Finally! These results look very promising, and they are, by far, more than I expected. I can’t wait to give these drivers a try.

As for the lack of source, oh well. Its proprietary, but its fast. I can play Q3A in true 32-bit color at the fastest possible framerate; that’s reason enough to not care.

I’ve had 3Dfx biggots flame me via email for things I’ve posted to linuxquake.com endorsing nVidia, and especially the GeForce, but I’ll say here what I said to them: If you want to use inferior hardware just because you have the source for the drivers, go for it. I’ll be happy with my GeForce.

Thanks for the first look, its helping me get through the rest of the work day ’til I can get home and patch everything up. :-)

Nick

By: Hohlraum

Hohlraum — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you guys do another round up, will you post results for higher resolutions? I can’t imagine running less than 10×7 when gaming :)

By: jvmatthe

jvmatthe — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The reason that I’ve been testing this way is that it is extremely easy for other users to compare their results. The fewer tweaks necessary, the better.

That said, you have a point. Most people don’t play at 800×600. Thanks for making the suggestion and I’ll try to work out a better system for the upcoming article.

Regards,
matt

By: journey

journey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

how long till were going to see the g400max
reviews? I’d really like to see how they compare.
My G400 beets the TNT2 on HQ 800×600, but
i’m on a K7-550 rather than a PIII-600E. I’m
wondering how it compares at other rates(although
i’m sure it wont compare to the GeForce:)

Erik

By: Brother Grifter

Brother Grifter — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I really nevered cared too much about open/closed source when it comes to driver developement, but you have to think about projects working on the creative Dxr2 driver, the emu10k1 driver, and then the matrox drivers. This is why people want nVidia to open there driver source. All these drivers work great and its because of open source. I remember when creative finally released the source the emu10k1 hardware, capable drivers were out in 2-3 days. It was great. However when it came to gaming, 3dfx really showed they supported linux by opening their source. The GeForce is better hardware then the V3 anyday, but the V3 is a pretty old card compared the GeForce. I’d like to see what flame war arrives when the V5 comes out with open source drivers and the GeForce2 arrives with its source closed.

However, I’ll leave all the flames for the crazed linux-advocates. =)

By: [TWD]insomnia

[TWD]insomnia — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t seem to make anything work reliably. The XMMS OpenGL spectrum plugin crashes X, q3 exits as soon as I see the first frame of a level (and exits with a “BadRequest” something with GLX), q2 made horrible glitches, worked the first time, now I can’t make it work (!), when used along with the au8830.o driver (patched by bofh (look at linux.aureal.com)), my machine will completely lock. Worse, I had to modify by hand /usr/src/include/linux/types.h to remove the _KERNEL_STRICT stuff so it could compile (cpp would report that some typedef’s weren’t compiled..)

Still it’s beta, and I SAW it work with q2. It was a bit slower than q2 in windows, I think, but I can’t confirm (in Windows I run the AMD patch). MANY TIMES faster than the old GLX drivers. Can’t wait until the final drivers hit the street.

My 2 cents

By: shad

shad — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just wondering about the timedemos with the GeForce compared to what I’ve got. I’ve just installed X4 with the Nvidia drivers and only get 34fps at 800×600, r_picmip 5, and everything turned off — seems kinda strange that it’s slower than the V3 2k I had. Any suggestions on where to look for possible Mesa conflicts? I’ve tried /usr/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib, as well as renaming the suggested files in the extensions directory.

The machine I’m running on is a Celeron 450, 128M RAM, Visiontek GeForce SDR, and RH 6.2. Looks kind of close to one of the benchmark computers linuxgames used.

Any suggestions would be welcome…

By: shad

shad — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just read a post on /. — rm -f /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL* solved the problem. I thought I needed to save libGL.so.1.2, but I guess I didn’t. 84fps sounds much better than the previous 34. ;)

By: mhawee

mhawee — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I can get my Viper TNT2 Ultra cart to work… i have installed from tar files ith a InstallScript and i CAN get X to work with the orginal “nv_drv.o” driver … BUT then i tried to change it to the new “nvidia_drv.o” the screen went black… and i have to press reset…. in the XFree86 Log file it says that he CAN start the drivers but in the end of the file he says he can’t get any VideoMemory for an example.. i’m so angry .. for this…. Nvidia says they support the most normal AGP sets… i use BX chipset, the MOST used chipsets i fink… and my card A Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 Ultra AGP2 hmmzzzz thats the heck is wrong … ?????
Anyone ..???

By: JEDiKNiTE

JEDiKNiTE — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

i had the same problem, but then i discovered that the install script didn’t create the device nodes.
run this script:

#!/bin/sh
set — `cat /proc/devices | grep –word-regexp nvidia`
nvnode=$1

for d in 0 1 2 3
do
devfile=/dev/nvidia$d
rm -f $devfile
mknod $devfile c $nvnode $d
chmod 0666 $devfile
done

devfile=/dev/nvidiactl
rm -f $devfile
mknod $devfile c $nvnode 255
chmod 0666 $devfile

it should create the nodes.
then you may have to add this:

alias char-major-195 NVdriver

to /etc/modules.conf or /etc/conf.modules and then modprobe NVdriver