NVIDIA Drivers for IA32, IA64, and AMD64
December 11th, 2002 by AlkiniAndy Mecham from NVIDIA wrote in toannounce that three new display drivershave been released for three new Linux platforms:
Each of them includes support for GLX 1.3, OpenGL 1.4, and CineFX. The IA32 driver includes support for AGP 8x and nForce2 IGP, separate X screens on nView enabled GPUs, and index overlays on Quadro4 to support legacy applications.
December 11th, 2002 at 12:12 pm
they should consider using real version numbers.
December 11th, 2002 at 1:31 pm
You have to give it up to nvidia. They are really making good on their promise to support linux.
If only the Radeons were this well supported. (One of my users just bought a new laptop with a new Radeon mobility chip. He is stuck using the very slow VESA xfree86 driver.
December 11th, 2002 at 1:39 pm
…for all those folks with Macs with nVidia cards…
December 11th, 2002 at 2:03 pm
The 2D performance sees quite a decrease in this release, probably because they stopped using XAA for 2D acceleration as noted in the ChangeLog:
” * The driver no longer uses the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA),
but provides its own 2D acceleration architecture to better accomodate
the needs of simultaneous 3D and 2D rendering.”
I’ve already noticed a few specific problems, and reported them to NVIDIA.
But I feel bad because I don’t like helping non-free software.
December 11th, 2002 at 3:16 pm
X still locks up almost instantaneously while playing some movies. I was hoping this release would fix that problem. :(
December 11th, 2002 at 3:45 pm
Anyone out there have some benchmarks yet? I am stuck at work, but I will put some up when I get home.
Derek
December 11th, 2002 at 4:23 pm
Now if ATi got off their collective ass and write drivers for the R200/RV250/R300 worth a damn like these we’d have ourselves a nice lil Linux feud. The FGLRX drivers are good, but to me haven’t gone anywhere since we first shed light on them working on all R200s. Still no 16-bit color, framebuffer consoles going to crap. It still needs a lot of work, and not too much to me has shown, aside from the very good start of S3TC.
December 11th, 2002 at 6:44 pm
I’ve been using a Ti4200 and two monitors. Clone always worked, but using another arrangement, e.g. LeftOf, caused lockups if an OpenGL application was running (especially when switching desktops in KDE).
So far the new drivers seem to work fine. Not sure about the 3D speed yet (every time I upgrade, the speed is down until the first reboot for some reason) but the 2D redraw (dragging windows) is laggy. Playing videos still works fine, and 3D seems to be fine.
Much better to have laggy window dragging than crashes though!
December 11th, 2002 at 7:23 pm
Ok, I have benchmarked the new drivers and the old drivers. I also took this chance to put to rest an argument that is often had about which is better: NVagp or kernel_AGP.
Here are the results:
Old drivers + NVagp:
UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2002-09-19_17.26]
No OS
AuthenticAMD PentiumPro-class processor @ 1200 MHz
No Video
ctf-citadel?spectatoronly=true?numbots=12?quickstart=true -benchmark -seconds=77 -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt
10.091605 / 28.360306 / 63.972916 fps rand[1309800544]
Score = 28.375578
##########################################
New Drivers + NVagp:
UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2002-09-19_17.26]
No OS
AuthenticAMD PentiumPro-class processor @ 1200 MHz
No Video
ctf-citadel?spectatoronly=true?numbots=12?quickstart=true -benchmark -seconds=77 -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt
8.543182 / 28.468082 / 64.255112 fps rand[1309800544]
Score = 28.488590
#######################################
New Drivers + kernel_agp:
UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2002-09-19_17.26]
No OS
AuthenticAMD PentiumPro-class processor @ 1200 MHz
No Video
ctf-citadel?spectatoronly=true?numbots=12?quickstart=true -benchmark -seconds=77 -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt
5.945003 / 14.400180 / 48.299469 fps rand[1309800544]
Score = 14.401580
###################################
This was in UT2k3 with everything on High in 1024×768. This is on my 1.2Ghz Athlon with 512MB of RAM and a Geforce3 TI 4200 running Gentoo Linux 1.4.
As you can see the new drivers offer almost no improvement over the old driver (not that I can tell atleast).
What is easy to see is that the Kernel_agp implementation SUCKS! Do NOT compile agp support into your kernel if you have an nvidia card. It is something that I have said for a long time, but I am glad to have benchmarks to back this up now. My scores dropped by 1/2 while using the kernel_agp implemention!
Comment away!
Derek
December 12th, 2002 at 6:18 am
The Qt function QGLWidget::renderPixmap() no longer causes X-server crashes with the new drivers.
This bug had been there for [i]ages[/i] – looks like they have finally fixed it.
=^_^=
December 12th, 2002 at 11:35 am
we binarize your kernel, resistance is futile.
December 12th, 2002 at 11:49 am
I have a SIS 735 based mobo and a Geforce3 Ti 200 with gentoo 1.4 on it. I installed these new drivers and X never came up. The numlock light would toggle, but I had to use the “special” key combo to sync and reboot the machine. I went through several iterations of this (loading agpgart, not loading it, changing to 2.4.20 vanilla, turning SBA and FBW on and off…)
Fell back to 3123 and everything works again.
December 12th, 2002 at 12:36 pm
On my system, a 3D game benchmark app I use got about 40 mil tris/sec with the previous drivers. New drivers get about 30 mil tris/sec. (NvAGP instead of agpgart was 45 mil previously, new drivers NvAGP still 30 mil.) AGP 4x is confirmed with both NvAGP and agpgart — otherwise it drops off to 17 mil tris/sec with no AGP.
So 3123 is faster on my SMP Athlon 1600+ (2 cpus), Ti 4200, but it locks up using NView in anything but clone for the 2nd monitor (even with a non-SMP kernel).
4191 is about the same speed as one of the older releases (29/30 mil tris) but NView finally works with 2 monitors correctly (digtal LCD monitor on the DVI output is LeftOf the CRT monitor). I haven’t tried it with a non-SMP kernel to see if there’s some kind of locking issue that is limiting the speed under SMP.
December 12th, 2002 at 4:35 pm
Urmm.. I get constant lockups w/ theese new drivers.. I guess Iam sticking w/ the previous release…
December 14th, 2002 at 7:32 am
I’m not so sure if the driver is better or worse.
glxgears reports around the same speed as for the older drivers, fps counter in quake reports around 35fps less than with the previous ones. I never got anywhere close to those marvelous fps as everyone reports.
There is a few negative things about the driver, I get really strange Gnome1.4 crashes, when I open the gonme menu, the gui can sometimes lock, don’t react on keyboard input anymore, windows can’t be moved, but the mouse pointer moves around as it should. The only thing I can do, is kill the X from my servers console, as there is no change if you wait 5 minutes or a hour.
Maybe next version would be good, it’s not first time that drivers have gone worse for a while, but I fear that older versions of the TNT/GF cards would be dropped.