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whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Is nvidia (+compiz/vdpau etc) broken or something?

Hi!

Using nvidia 337.25-1 (/GeForce GTX 560 Ti), vdpau  0.7-1, compiz, smplayer, etc. I'm having weird issues with my graphics card and no idea what's going on. I've seen journal entries like this for a while, but never had any problems before, so it might be unrelated:

Jun 05 14:17:22 arch kernel: NVRM: GPU at 0000:01:00: GPU-9cfaccf3-fe6a-308f-593d-400574a0d22d
Jun 05 14:17:22 arch kernel: NVRM: Xid (0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000003, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000

I get weird random rendering mixups after working for a while (while at other times, everything worked fine for hours), p.E.:
- an enlarged translucent part of thunars folder view is rendered over part of firefox and translated opposite to the way I move my mouse
- video flickers very fast, every maybe every ~second frame seems to be replaced with an interlaced combination of my desktop wallpaper and scrambled parts of the firefox context menu ( ~ 11px rows of the two alternating )
- Letters and fonts suddenly replaced by weird symbols
- sometimes even screen parts from another user were visible (I think it were textures from some game I tried in wine, not sure though)

Also seemingly random freezes (not even syrq helped).

Haven't been able totally pinpoint the cause. At first it looked as if the problem was caused by wine, compiz, using multiple displays. But after I got rid of all that, I was able to reproduce it (especially the freezed) with compiz, vdpau and smplayer only (works best by rapidly changing the size of a window with running video). I'm not a 100% sure about that, but I think I had similar problems while all those weren't running too.

Haven't been able to figure out a way to test if my graphics card is broken yet ( other than using it without vdpau and later maybe compiz for a few day's, which I have started to do now. So far, with compiz but without vdpau no errors. I don't really use my graphics cards "advanced rendering stuff" for much else though so I might need to wait a long time before I see any rendering related errors ). Does anyone have an idea how to go about figuring thisout faster / more efficiently & eventually fixing it?

thx!

Last edited by whoops (2014-07-02 13:28:18)

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: Is nvidia (+compiz/vdpau etc) broken or something?

Have not been able to reproduce the problems without compiz running. Extensive testing of vdpau in plain xfce showed no problems.
Also have not been able to figure out why it suddenly started making those problems or how to fix this. I've been using this system with compiz for quite a few years now and it worked just fine.

In addition I noticed, the following applications always make my X freeze if I zoom out with compiz desktop wall:
- Steam
- smplayer with vdpau enabled
- chromium
- flash player with hardware acceleration

Everything else I'm using seems to work. Tried those things in xfce and had no problems even when running everything at once side to side (also tried some opengl / dx stuff in wine - no issues).

Any hints / ideas?

Last edited by whoops (2014-07-02 13:30:48)

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: Is nvidia (+compiz/vdpau etc) broken or something?

Still broken. Using blender almost impossible / instant freeze that requires reboot.

Found this: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi … ow-resize/

Sounds like it could be the same problem I'm having. Currently trying to downgrade nvidia (which is a PITA because the packages are split and I can't remove either one without overriding or removing half of all packages due to mesa T_T), so I haven't gotten to test that yet.

edit: Did not manage to downgrade the package. Might not be compatible with new kernel.

Last edited by whoops (2014-10-15 09:01:44)

HiImTye

Member

From: Halifax, NS, Canada

Registered: 2012-05-09

Posts: 1,072

Re: Is nvidia (+compiz/vdpau etc) broken or something?

have you ruled out hardware problems? are your fans dust free, etc? overheating can lead to a lot of graphical errors and is often overlooked

edit: Did not manage to downgrade the package. Might not be compatible with new kernel.

you should be able to build old versions in the rollback machine against the current kernel.

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: Is nvidia (+compiz/vdpau etc) broken or something?

have you ruled out hardware problems?

Is that possible without buying 2 more identical graphic cards?
All i can say is that it performs fine (even stress tests) except under the conditions I listed. And minimizing the offending windows before I switch to another desktop also seems to be a reliable workaround. Also, the problems with steam I had when I first encountered the problem, disappeared after an update.

you should be able to build old versions in the rollback machine against the current kernel.

Yes, that's what I tried, couldn't get it to build (error: variable ‘nv_acpi_driver_template’ has initializer but incomplete type). Maybe nvidia needs some user patches... the patches for the new kernel don't work with the old nvidia and the patches for the old nvidia won't work with the new kernel. Or something like that. Gave up after reading old gentoo threads for half an hour without even being able to figure out if I was looking in the right place. That stuff is way over my head.

Last edited by whoops (2014-10-15 15:54:19)