Hi,

I am running a xubuntu 6.10 and use a nVidia Corporation NV4 [RIVA TNT] (rev 04) video card. The performance is baaaaaad, choppy rendering etc, is there something I can do about that? In xorg.conf, in the section I think is relevant:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "vesa"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection


Is there another driver I could choose? How?

Regards,

Peter

First, make a backup copy of your xorg.conf, then you could try replacing
Driver "vesa" with Driver "nv"

Or you could install the nvidia_legacy driver, which should work with an old TNT.

vesa is just the generic video card driver. You want either the nv (open-source) driver, or the nvidia-glx-legacy (proprietary, but best performance). Just do a sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-legacy, followed by a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg & select nvidia for the driver (or you could change it to "nvidia" in the xorg.conf).

Thanks, that seems to have worked (I get the nvidia screen, I just have to nologo it away still ...) but the performance is only marginally better.
It is a shared memory card, maybe I should twiddle the memory settings, but how / where do I do that? Is there a way to tune the performance of the card?

I keep coming back to this because it is a dual boot system, and in W2K the behavior is totally smooth ... with the same apps, mainly thunderbird, firefox and openoffice

I would be amazed that the video performance _decreases_ with linux, so pointers anyone?

Regards,

Peter

I'm not sure if this will work, but under device, add Option "NvAGP" "3". Forget what I said about the nv driver, just use the nvidia one. Also, check that nvidia-kernel-common is installed as well.

Now, is the performance strictly related to 3d stuff, or is it bad everywhere? Post your cpu & ram specs.

If you are getting choppy video from your cd-rom or DVD player and/or slow hard drive performance, try this from a root terminal:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

This will turn on UDMA for both your hard drive and cd-rom. sometimes /hda or /hdc will need to be changed to something else (to suit your system)

good luck

generically bad, PIII 500 Mhz, 640MbRAM

It's a Diamond Viper 16MB card

The tips you gave improved it quite a bit, but I think the PC is slowly falling behind it is, after all, already 8 years old ...

The hdparm tip did not do anything noticeable, I suspect it was turned on already.

Regards,

Peter

Your cpu is a little on the slow side, which could be the culprit but you have more than enough ram.

If you have the time to do so, try loading something that's a little more easier on the system such as Zenwalk. It's a little more difficult to install, but it's a lot faster than xubuntu (at least that's what people said at Ubuntuforums.org).

Or, if you're feeling more adventurous, get Gentoo, which optimizes everything for your system.

a last point, hdparm returned the stuff below, is there any possibilty for improvement there?

[HTML]hdparm -v /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 26500/16/63, sectors = 26712000, start = 0[/HTML]

Regards,

Peter