Hello,

Im running Gentoo with a 2.6.22-gentoo-r8 kernel. When I run anything that requires 3d acceleration (it doesnt matter if its compiz/glxgears/ut or enemy territory) I get high fps but the video is choppy. It pisses me off, since I have to reboot to windows (everything works fine there) everytime I want to play games although they have linux ports. I have a GeForce 7300 GS on PCI-e.

Things I have tried and gave no effect:
* Testing -ck and vanilla kernels
* Changing sound settings
* Disabling AGPART
* Disabling MTRR (some memory was uncacheable)
* Disabling Compiz-fusion
* Disabling TV-OUT
* Changing various settings in xorg.conf and nvidia-settings

Useful info:
xorg.conf - http://phpfi.com/268303
lspci - http://phpfi.com/268304
glxinfo - http://phpfi.com/268305
cat /proc/driver/nvidia/registry - http://phpfi.com/268306

media-video/nvidia-settings ver. 1.0.20070621
x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers ver. 100.14.19
x11-base/xorg-x11 ver. 7.2
x11-base/xorg-server ver. 1.3.0.0

I would appreciate any help because google doesnt know much about this problem...

Games in Linux needs at least a gigabyte of RAM. Your video is low end, so it will not perform well. OpenGL needs a mid-end to high-end video card for fast frames per second. The Composite module should not be used during playing games.

I suggest re-compile the kernel with voluntary preemptive or preemptive and setting the clock between each program from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz. This should improve game playing and many other tasks like multimedia playback. If these settings does not, then a piece of unknown hardware is conflicted with the computer. You can try upgrading the module or just take it out. I suggest downgrading the nVidia module to a version that Gentoo developers have stated as stable. Not always the latest module version will be better. I suggest use -Os optimization flag instead of -O2 because -Os uses less memory. If you are using KDE as your desktop/window manager, artsd might be getting in the way and the games are screwing up trying to keep the sound in sync with the video. I recommend do not use KDE and do not load artsd or any sound daemon mixers. Use just ALSA or use its OSS compatibility layer.

I have a notebook computer with 2GB of RAM, Intel T7300, and nVidia GeForce8 8400M GS /w 128MB memory. I am finishing up on installing Gentoo, but I will try to test UT2004 on it later this week. Though I do not expect fast performance because my video card is low-end and it does not have enough video memory to store textures and other rendered datail although the RAM capacity and dual processors should help out. My other system that runs UT2004 well in Linux has Pentium 4 2GHz (Northwood core), 4x256MB (1GB total) ECC RAMBUS, and GeForceFX 5700 Ultra /w 128 MB of video memory. A suggest the minimum video memory be 256MB.

A video memory of 512MB will do a lot better, so I recommend that capacity to do well in almost every map or game. Details may have to be set to medium to get ok performance with a card with 512MB. If you want high details, a video card with memory capacity of 768MB to a 1GB will be better. The memory bandwidth have to be wide as well. It does help have a very fast GPU too. Xinerama may decrease performance so do not use it. Also Twinview uses Xinerama, so turn it off too.

I dont really think its a performance problem, since i remember playing ut (the first ut, im not talking about ut 2k3/2k4) on PII 350mhz with a geforce2 and it was running very smoothly.

Moreover, like I said, those games run smooth on windows and I get high fps (100+) when running them on linux, which is just weird in my opinion.
And I get this problem even when running glxrears - I get 1200fps but the display is choppy :/

Ill try changing my kernel settings and hope it helps.

edit:
It works fine on xubuntu, Ill try compiling my kernel with the xubuntu kernel config.

No offense, but I get annoyed when people want help and they do not provide enough information for me or others to help them thoroughly. You should of said UT2000 GOTY or something in the beginning. Also your computer specs. I ran UT2000 GOTY on my AMD Athlon 700 MHz with 512MB of RAM and GeForce4 420MX with 64 megabytes of memory. That computer does well, but the distribution at that time was Mandrake 9.0. I do not want to brag, but your computer is under power for games.

Since your computer is under power and providing said 'choppy' video, I suggest check your logs, buy a new hard drive, take out all hardware and leave the video card for a test, increase AGP memory to its max (only if you have a lot of memory), read through the kernel parameter documentation. All I can say it is a software problem, so it is hard to track down.

glxgears is a horrible tool for benchmarks. glxgears is designed to test 3D to find out if it is working. If it draws gears and they are moving, then 3D is working. Also since FPS algorithms is written for previous GUI servers such as XFree86 4.2, Xorg 7.x could be giving the program false information. I know for a fact that Xorg 7 is giving false information to UT2004.

In conclusion, since the computer is old and you are using an obsolete game, you are at the mercy of your setup. You can bit your lip and play the game or buy a new computer and a more up to date game.

I am sorry I can not help you any further.

Might google and see if you can find options to add to the xorg config file to enable features on your video card. I have found a few at nvidia's site for my geforce that boosted performance in games and got rid of a bit of choppiness. I am running both a geforce 5200FX and a geforce 6800 with no problems ( 2 different systems ). Both seem to perform fine with 3d games. (both system with 4 gigs ram)