New NVIDIA Drivers Released
December 24th, 2003 by MarvServeral people have pointed out that the fact that NVIDIA has released a new set of display drivers.Neverinter Nights fans should hold up on installing these driver as the game is unplayable after installing these drivers. Changes in this release include:
- Supports latest GeForce FX and Quadro FX GPUs
- Added support for UBB and FSAA Stereo.
- Improved GLXPixmap support.
- Added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0.
- Added support for GLX_SGI_swap_control.
- Reduced CPU usage when OpenGL applications are syncing to vblank.
Downloads: Linux Display Driver – 1.0-5328
December 24th, 2003 at 11:45 am
GLPixamp? Don’t they mean GLPixmap?
December 24th, 2003 at 11:54 am
copied a typo, doh
December 24th, 2003 at 12:03 pm
I have no problems with the driver whatsoever. NWN works like a dream. I’ve played about two hours last night. All other (GL) games also work flawlessly.
December 24th, 2003 at 2:09 pm
For those that fail, what card are you using?
Works flawlessly here on a Geforce 2 GTS.
December 24th, 2003 at 4:19 pm
I think whatever problem some people are having with the new drivers may be related to the kernel they’re running. I saw someone on slashdot paste a kernel oops that happened when starting X, causing all OpenGL rendering to be unaccelerated.
December 24th, 2003 at 4:58 pm
I had the problem with either an oops or unaccelerated rendering with Fedora Core 1 and the 2.4.22 kernel. From the various nVIDIA forums it turns out that with VIA chipsets especially there is a problem with the new drivers. The problem, as I understand it, is with the modifications the driver makes to AGPGART and a bad habit of returning NULL for the AGP handle the AGP setup wasn’t finished correctly. The minion.de 2.6.0 patch has a fix for this but if you are using a 2.4 kernel all you need is this one part of the minion.de patch:
http://icculus.org/~taylor/misc/nvidia_agp-5328.diff
Run the installer with –extract-only and then apply the patch (with -p1) within the created directory. Run ./nvidia-installer to install the new drivers with the fixed nvidia.o kernel module. Remember though that this is only for the nvidia.o module that you build yourself, using a prebuilt module isn’t going to work. If you’ve already gotten the drivers installed then you can just go into the ./usr/src/nv directory and type ‘make’ to build and install the new kernel module.
It worked for me anyway. This may not be the only issue with the new driver though so keep that in mind. In other words, YMMV.
December 24th, 2003 at 6:19 pm
i’m not getting any kernel panics or the like, although i’ve seen the results of several poorly handled NULL pointer oop’s for other people.
From what i’ve heard, it’s related to the agp driver you’re using, so if you swap from agpgart to NVagp, or vice versa (defaults to agpgart iirc) it might help get it working, or just apply patches that fix the issue.
meanwhile, for me, if i run neverwinter nights in a window, i find i get weird blocky black patches on the top half of the window if it DOESN’T have focus for a short period.
goes away when it regains focus, so it’s hardly a problem, just an annoyance.
one wonders if the bug is bioware’s or nvidia’s tho, one presumes the GL library met a bunch of standard tests…
using a geforce 4 ti 4800 here.
ashridah
December 24th, 2003 at 8:32 pm
GeForce FX 5200, 2.6 Kernel, Gentoo
December 25th, 2003 at 5:33 am
I’m running 2.6.0 on a dual athlon rig with a Geforce 4 Ti4600.
X works fine, and GL stuff seems plenty fast (ut2003 plays smoothly). The only caveat I have is that as soon as I fire up X, I can’t drop back to console without a reboot. The machine doesn’t lock up or anything, it’s just that the console remains black. It’s not a huge deal, but is a little annoying.
December 26th, 2003 at 11:01 am
The new driver still doesn’t work on Samsung X10 laptops with a GF-Go graphics card… :((
December 26th, 2003 at 5:43 pm
fx5200 w/ hacked-up redhat 5.1.
I like the idea of sleeping while waiting for a vblank — it really seems to work. Cool.
On the other hand the performance of reading the framebuffer back into a texture seems to have dropped quite sharply since 4xxx (I could be mistaken, but I don’t think so — I could downgrade back to 4xxx to verify if anyone here is in a position to look into it).
December 29th, 2003 at 2:20 am
Im running Fedora with the latest kernel and NVIDIA drivers and NWN and all my WineX games run flawlessly. The install of the drivers was very smooth as well. A+++ to Nvidia!
December 30th, 2003 at 4:25 pm
So far the consensus is VIA chipsets for AMD processors are having trouble and others (2.4.x kernel) mostly work. 2.6 kernel builds can work with a little extra effort.
see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/
Maybe I’ll try Fedora + GF3 + nforce2 + new driver tonight…
Good luck.
January 2nd, 2004 at 6:17 pm
Improved my graphic performance on ut2003 by about 30%
(256pci 5200)
thanks NVIDIA!
January 2nd, 2004 at 6:21 pm
Improved ut2003 performance by about 30%
(pci 256mb 5200)
Thanks NVIDIA!