dear all,

I'm running Slackware 10 on my Dell Latitude D800 which has a GeForce FX Go5200 32 Mb video card. I installed the lastest Nvidia driver (6629) on a 2.6.9 kernel and xorg 6.7. xscreensaver is running really slow in showing the OpenGL screensavers. The bouncing cow bounces very slow and shocky not to speak of the chess game which takes ages to get in the view. The preview (in the small window) looks nice and smooth though.


Hardware accelaration is activated (checked by glxinfo) and cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status gives me

Status: Enabled
Driver: NVIDIA
AGP Rate: 4x
Fast Writes: Enabled
SBA: Enabled

Tux racer is running really smooth, no problems there.
I tried activating DRI in the xorg.conf but it made no difference. If I maximise the glxgears window I get:

12 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2.400 FPS
13 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2.600 FPS
12 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2.400 FPS

Is it normal to get such a crappy performance from this card or is something wrong? Is xscreensaver using some other OpenGL library or something? Should I install anything else (like MESA but I believe that's a nono with the Nvidia driver).?

you might turn on DMA.............
what do you get with: replace xx with partition

thank you for your response,

unfortunately dma is already turned on. I do notice that CPU goes to 100 % when showing an opengl screensaver as if the screensaver is not using the hardware accelaration (or DMA ).

Run glxinfo and examine the output. Specifically, look for direct rendering: Yes.

Those framerates are horrendous. My lowly G4 800MHz gets >200fps in X11 on OSX, so you have a problem for sure.

that's the weird thing, direct rendering is on:

name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.3
server glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGI_video_sync, GLX_SGI_swap_control,
GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_NV_float_buffer
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx version string: 1.3
client glx extensions:
...

could it be the driver itself or something in my kernel config?

DMA would most likely not help in such situations ever. Most screensavers are so small in size, once started, they are going to run from RAM or Memory anyways..

That's only true if all your machine is doing is running the screensaver (though I too doubt that it's the cause of the problem in this case). Start up a screensaver, turn off dma on the drives, do something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/you/junk.img bs=512 and watch the framerate go down the toilet.

Just for giggles, run

hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda

and repeat for your other drives.

ok, the transfer mode was set to 16 bit. It's now 32 but that doesn't change much. Is there a way to make this change permanent (besides putting the hdparm command in a boot script).

I did found a solution for the lousy performance but that doesn't mean I understand it. In xscreensaver-demo for each openGL screensaver I go to settings , advanced, Visual and I change it from GL to Best. With this setting (what ever it implies) practically al openGL screensaver (except the chess game) run really smooth. Does any of you now what the setting does?

This thread is really old, but if anyone else has the same problem...
If you're using KDE, where you select the screensaver in the Control Center, make sure the box that says "Make aware of Power Management" is UNchecked.