Hardware acceleration working/not working. Out of ideas
 

Hello, Im having a very serious problem trying to get the hardware acceleration
working, or rather, according to the system it works but it is obvious by looking at the performance that it isnt working. Running glxgears gives me about 700FPS, I dont know how good that is for my specs:

MP4 1.6Ghz
512MB DDR Ram
32 MB on board video (intel 855GM)

When i run a game like NWN i get approx 3fps which makes it unplayable, whats odd is that in a much older box(getting 300fps in glxgears) i get a good 30fps in NWN. glxinfo says i have direct rendering enabled:
glxinfo
----------------------------------
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context
client glx vendor string: SGI
client glx version string: 1.2
client glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context
GLX extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context
OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 852GM/855GM 20021115
OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 4.0.4
----------------------------------

Also my XFreeConfig is set up correctly with "DRI" enabled and the i810 driver loaded:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Section "Device"
Identifier "i810"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "DRI" "true"
VideoRam 65536
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Option "AllowFastWrite" "1"
Option "Rotate" "off"
EndSection
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also the Load glx, Load dri, Load GLcore etc are all there
The module agpart is also loaded.

When i run glxgears the processing activity goes up to 52% and when running
NWN it maxes out, it appears that software rendering i still being used even
though hardware rendering should be working. Im really out of ideas, have been at this for a couple of days now and im not getting anywhere. If you have any tips i would appreciate it.

Relevant lspci line:
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)

Emist.

Given that you have an integrated video chip, these specs seem about right for your setup. If glxinfo says that you have direct rendering, then I'm afraid that's as good as it's going to get. :( I know that really sucks, but integrated chips aren't designed to play games, especially relatively newer ones like NwN. If that's your interest, I suggest getting a dedicated video card--chances are your motherboard has an AGP slot for that.

Yeah i expected the performance to be low taking into account the hardware but the same game plays decently in my windows partition, i get about 15-20fps which is playable, also the gl screensavers also play rather slow. Could there be something else that im missing? Thanks giving a hand mate :)

If you can get decent performance in Windows, then I'd say it might be the drivers. Sometimes the linux drivers for certain types of hardware (especially video cards) aren't quite as good as their Windows counterparts. I've never had an integrated chip, so I'm not quite sure about how good the Linux drivers are. Nonetheless, you'd do far better with a *real* video card. :) Cards by both ATI and NVIDIA work great in Linux.

Alright ill look into trying a different driver and try my luck. I would get a real card but this is a laptop so im kind of stuck :(

What kind of laptop? (just curious)

Acer Travelmate 4500

A Word Of Warning
 

Don't ever buy an ATI card to use under linux. I have a 9600XT, and I have had FC2 & FC3. Have tried many, many different how to's/tutorials/random guesswork, none of it ever worked. No 3D acceleration at all. Now I'm on gentoo I've had a quick go with no success, but I might try again soon. So steer clear of ATI for linux, they're just not taking the linux drivers seriously. I've had no experience with nVidia under linux, but it could hardly be worse than ATi..

No idea about the mouse, sorry, but I'd very strongly advise you to get an NVidia card. Their driver support is very good, and installing is not as hard as is sometimes made out.

that makes two of us, infinity42.

Slightly graphic performance improvements may also be given by using the latest Game-Update:

http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html


i don't have NWN, so i can only compare with glxgears for my NVidia GeForce FX 5200: 1900 FPS.

The i810 was really no Gamingchip.

He's right, go with Nvidia, not ATI. On Ubuntu, I typed sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings nvidia-glx and the drivers were downloaded and installed. Then, I edited a single config file, changing two lines, and then restarted x. Works perfectly. I get about 1850 FPS on my GeForce FX 5200. The newer Nvidia's (espescially the Quadro's) get even more FPS. Just one thing to watch out for. Don't run out on the day a new card is released and expect the nvidia drivers to work. dont even expect the nv drivers to work. You normally have to give them a month or two to release a new driver, but once they do the performance is on par with Windows.

I got to say the nvidia support for linux is pretty awesome, I have an nvidia card on my desktop and the driver installation was a breeze and the gaming performance is great.