mini Posted January 14, 2006 Report Share Posted January 14, 2006 I have a Shuttle XPC barebone for AMD 64 processors with nVidia GeForce FX5200 250MHz, 128MB DDR 400MHz graphic card. But the graphic card had a fan and this guy was just driving me crazy. I've decided to change to a card with a pasive cooling. I got nVidia GeForce NX6200AX 300MHz, 256MB DDR 550MHz. It seems like I've upgraded my system. NO, I didn't. I"m running Mandriva 2006 x86_64 Power Pack and using nvidia driver (Mandrake compiled I didn't care to instal one from nvidia website). The FX5200 scored around 2750fps in glxgears and NX6200 around 1300fps Any idea on what could go wrong, where to look and how to fix it!? By the way glxgears takes 100% of my CPU, I would expect that it should rather be tough on nVidia graphic chipset... For the curious my xorg.conf and output of glxinfo as an attachment xorg.conf.txt glxinfo.txt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted January 14, 2006 Report Share Posted January 14, 2006 If you don't use the drivers from nvidia, you will not get performance, period. Mandriva has never made good drivers for nvidia, always distributing the nvidia drivers in the boxed sets which they sell. Get the proprietary drivers. They're free. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaglin Posted January 14, 2006 Report Share Posted January 14, 2006 Hi There, I dunno if it will elp but I attach my xorg.conf and u will see some major differences in the module and in the device bits. I use the latest nvidia drivers with the coolbits options "on" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=197&num=1 Furthermore I use nvclock (urpmi nvclock etc...) to tune my gfx card. Since I did that I regularly play doom3 and quake 4 with very good FPS. I dunno if that helps but http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/installmdv2006.html was very usefull for me to read although O already new how to setup my system, Best of Luck! Stef. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mini Posted January 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 Thanks for a prompt response! Unfortunately I had a busy weekend and it's only today that I had some time to play with my system. I went trough the installation of nvidia drivers (from their website). Before that I've updated my kernel to 2.6.12-14mdk to have the latest. Mandriva provided nvidia driver (7676) was doing 1300fps in glxgears, nvidia driver from their website (8178) is doing... 1370fps. Looks like it doesn't make any difference :-/ So the problem with the low performance of my graphic card lays somewhere else. Does someone know how much approximately this card shall score in glxgears? Does performance of glxgears depends strongly on CPU speed? After all I may have a problem with configuration of my system rather than the graphic card itself. sjaglin you've failed to attach your xorg.conf file. If you don't mind I would be thankful to have a look there. Also I'm not playing games and I don't really need to squeze the last bit of performance out of GPU so I won't play with coolbits option neither nvclock but I would be glad to hear how much (%) did you manage to improve performance of your card!? Thanx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 coolbits gives you some additional adjustments not visible otherwise. Have you set your bios according to nvidia's recommendations? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 is AGP at the correct level? cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status what is the card capable of? cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/card what is the motherboard capable of? cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaglin Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 (edited) Ooops! Sorry, here is my file. Concerning you scores, depends how big the window in which the gears turn is. Mine is around 10100Fps with no tweaks no overclock and on nv9800 128Mb. I think doom3 will give you better benchmarks. Stef Edited January 18, 2006 by sjaglin@yahoo.co.uk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mini Posted January 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 I've checked my BIOS settings with nVidia recommendations (Thanks AussieJohn and Ixthusdan for a link!) There were 1 or 2 parameters to modify but it didn't influence the performance :-( Here is the contents of files in proc directory: [mini@gandalf ~]$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status Status: Enabled Driver: AGPGART AGP Rate: 8x Fast Writes: Disabled SBA: Enabled [mini@gandalf ~]$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/card Fast Writes: Supported SBA: Supported AGP Rates: 8x 4x Registers: 0xff000e1b:0x1f004302 [mini@gandalf ~]$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge Host Bridge: PCI device 10de:00e1 Fast Writes: Supported SBA: Supported AGP Rates: 8x 4x Registers: 0x1f00421b:0x00000302 So unless Fast Writes are supposed to be enabled everything looks rather OK. Stef your xorg.conf looks very similar to mine, I just don't have coolbits option on. Any other ideas? Thanks for help so far Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaglin Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 When you run the nvidia settings what sort of speed does it give you? Can you install nvclock et run nvclock -i then post the result to look at the info from that card? Stef Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mini Posted January 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 I was wandering what kind of speed I can read from nvidia-settings utility as there were none but then I've forgotten I haven't switched on the coolbits option on. That's what I've finally got: for both 2D and 3D GPU is 350MHz and Memory 400MHz. That's actually not according to the spec which says GPU 300MHz and memory 550MHz though I expect that the difference if any is not enough to blame for so low performance (1300fps in glxgears only). I've checked the software side of my installation quite carefully: if the correct drivers are lloaded, correct libraries, extension modules. It looks good. Also no errors are reported in /var/log/Xorg.0.log nor /proc/driver/nvidia/warnings/ Maybe I have some kind of hardware problem. No clear idea really :( And the output of nvclock -i is NVClock v0.7 Segmentation fault (core dumped) Err... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 It does look like you should activate Fast Writes. There should be something in your BIOS to activate this? Also, try adding this to your modules.conf options nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1 NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaglin Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 Question for daniewicz: Hi , as u seem to be on the ball regading nv stuff I had a query to the query: my /proc../agp/ gives : root@08:14:15->cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/* Fast Writes: Supported SBA: Supported AGP Rates: 8x 4x Registers: 0xff000e1b:0x1f000302 Host Bridge: PCI device 1106:3205 Fast Writes: Supported SBA: Supported AGP Rates: 8x 4x Registers: 0x1f000a1b:0x00000b02 Status: Enabled Driver: AGPGART AGP Rate: 8x Fast Writes: Disabled SBA: Enabled root@08:14:31-> Whuch shows fastwrites disabled. I see here and there that I should add a line to a file named modules.conf but I don t seem to have such a file : root@08:14:31->locate modules.conf /etc/httpd/conf/webapps.d/addon-modules.conf /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/ssl-modules.conf /hdc6/etc/opt/gnome/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf /hdc6/etc/opt/gnome/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/ssl-modules.conf root@08:17:52-> Any idea?? Stef Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 Modules.conf no longer exists in mandriva. It should be /etc/modprobe.conf ls -l /etc/mod* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 123 Jan 18 14:16 /etc/modprobe.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3489 Aug 14 11:41 /etc/modprobe.devfs -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 392 Jan 18 13:12 /etc/modprobe.preload -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 274 Jan 17 08:35 /etc/modules Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaglin Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 Thnks Ian, you save my life again! I love ur website by the way, am a photographer as well... Stef Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 If it's a graphics module to load, it should be placed in modprobe.preload. This is where I put stuff. Sample of my modprobe.preload: cat /etc/modprobe.preload # /etc/modprobe.preload: kernel modules to load at boot time. # # This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are # to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with # a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored. # this file is for module-init-tools (kernel 2.5 and above) ONLY # for old kernel use /etc/modules intel-agp toshiba nvram hw_random evdev This taken from my laptop hence the intel-agp! If I want graphics support for my chip, I should add i915 here as well, but not necessary since X loads it when I run X. Sometimes is required though if you find OpenGL isn't working! Many thanks for checking my site, haven't updated in ages, but will have more soon in a couple of weeks when I get my photos sorted! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.