Ok

Slackware 9.0 offical 4cd distro on
AMD AthlonXP 2400+
512DDR (2x256 in dual memory mode)
Soltek 75 FRN2-L motherboard
Abit GeForce 4 Ti4200 Siluro OTES

The problem is that the graphics card doesn't reach it's full potential, announcing that the AGP is not enabled. Now don't get me wrong, everything works in that i see KDE, and so forth, but the frame rate in Unreal Tournament 2003 is down, going as low as 13 fps. When on SuSE the same system bottomed out at 38 fps (peaking at over 480fps somewhere).

the kernel used, is a custom compile of 2.4.20 ... downloaded from kernel.org (not the supplied kernel on the CDs) and the driver is the NVIDIA 4363 either as the .run or as the tarball ... the effect is the same.

Symbolic of said effect is this:
bash-2.05b$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status
Status: Disabled

i figure if i can get Status to be "enabled" everything will be fine and women will find me attractive ... i mean UT2K3 will run sweet. (though surely me brooding over why it doesn't run sweet isn't particularly attractive ... but i'm getting off plot).

Now i am told from another forum ... this one that there are issues with agpgart and that i should be using NvAGP which the nvidia driver supplies. But that isn't working.

There seems to have been some advances on the Linux Kernel for version 2.4.21 which will incorporate nforce and differen agpgart handling, but the fact remains, it worked fine in SuSE 8.1 pro ... after a kernel compile and Nvidia driver install.

The frustrating thing isn't even that i can't play games, what's frustrating me is that i have to ask. Google doesn't yield anything helpful ... and i don't even know what to look for since everything i turn up doesn't seem to be relevant to my problem. I didn't think i was a n00b still... but clearly i was wrong.

Any help on this would be greatly appreachiated, and i can post logs and config information if need be.

Was it working with the stock kernel?

It was me who advised you to use nvAgp, sorry it doesn't work for you, but on my machine with near the same configuration (but with orig Slack kernel!) it works perfectly. And AGPGART complained about unsupporting nForce2 chipset (even with "try unsupported" option). Check the documentation, there are many other options for AGP, maybe one would be good for you.

Nope... doesn't work with the stock kernel.

edit:
You meant "try the stock kernel AND use the NVidia driver" didn't you.

Surfice it to say that now, that i have moved on from feeling "sufficiently dumb" everything is working well. I did have to recompile the kernel to get the modem working (though i am sure using modprobe would have worked too). The kernel isn't quite to my liking yet, but i'm not recompiling it again (today).

My theory is that i disabled MTRR support, which i only noticed after i reinstalled the Slackware package, so i couldn't (didn't) check my configuration ... though that is the theory i'm gonna stick with.

Thank You All for your advice. I feel stupid now, but aside from my pride nothing got hurt (well my leg yesterday, but that had nothing to do with the computer) :P

As i said, thank you.

Another advice : check BIOS settings concerninng on AGP. It should be set to "auto" or "8x".