NVidia graphics not as fast as they used to be.

adz · 09-15-2003, 04:39 AM

Hi there. I have recently experienced a slowdown in 2D accel. When I play a DVD, it plays jerkily and the sound cuts in and out. I can't think of anything that I've done recently to make it run slower. I don't use that computer often but the other people that use it don't use linux. Just for reference, DVD's play just fine in Windows XP on the same computer. I'm using the version 4496 driver from nvidia but I've tried the earlier one (4363) as well to no avail. I enabled fast write but there was no real improvement. I then downloaded an app called nvclock to overclock my card. I managed to get it from ~740 fps to ~1000 fps in glxgears but the 2D stuff has improved only very marginally.

Hardware:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400 (32 Mb RAM)
Memory: 256 Mb
40x DVD drive

This is more than enough to play DVDs. Just to see if there was anything hogging mem/CPU I ran top while playing the DVD. It showed some fairly standard stuff. There was still over 90 Mb of RAM unused and the CPU was ~20% idle. I tried using two different players: xine and ogle. Both with the same results. Anyone have any suggestions?

fruibat_2000 · 09-15-2003, 05:37 AM

do you use alsamixer, it seem that if you just close the window that alsamixer is in, it hogs the cpu. try "pkill alsamixer" also type "top" then press capital "P" this shows processes using the most cpu kill anything large :-)

adz · 09-15-2003, 06:04 AM

It's not alsamixer. I was running the OSS modules that comes with the kernel source. I then thought it might be the sound that was somehow slowing me down so I installed alsa. No joy. It was the same speed with and without alsa. Also, when I ran top the largest process seemed to be xfree86. I couldn't really kill that. Nothing else was running apart from an xterm, xconsole and the DVD player.

adz · 09-15-2003, 08:42 AM

One thing I thought of... I've recompiled the kernel numerous times. Maybe on eof the options has slowed down the performance. I did notice that the agpgart module wasn't loaded. I recompiled the kernel but no increase in speed. Does agpgart affect the nvidia module? Also, I get an error "Can't locate modules Char-major-5" I don't know what the module does or what module is meant to be aliased to that.