Nvidia: Disruptive choppiness, but, otherwise, working great....

Sgt.Pepper · 2009-07-25 03:33:41

Hello world

Right then. So I've been using Arch for awhile in a relatively successful capacity, and, though I registered a handle in here a little while ago, am making my first post here now.

I recently bought a Nvidia 9500GT gfxcard, swapping it in for my aging Radeon x600, as support for both this card under current prop. drivers, and the old drivers under the new x.org, had been ungracefully dropped, leaving me with a less-than-capable htpc. I plugged it in, still shaking from the excitement of the UPS guy's recent visit, booted up, logged into a console, and proceeded to install the nnvidia proprietary drivers via pacman. I double-checked all the library symlinks, hashed out a basic xorg.conf (with a little help from nvidia-xconfig), and fired up X.

Everything was rendering beautifully, with one small exception: every couple of seconds, X would hang. These hang usually come in pairs, each lasting for just an instant. I would describe it as choppiness, but, other than this issue, framerates were good. 4500+ in glxgears (I know, I know; not an accurate benchmark, but these numbers are indicitave of, at the very least, good rendering), glxinfo showed fine for direct rendering, vendor info, and such, and nexuiz was running EXTREMELY smoothly, in between hangs. According to top, X is using ~%20 of my cpu, which, quite frankly, shouldn't be happening if I'm just staring at fluxbox, and, when I fired up glxgears, it reported that - get this - gears was using %100, while X was using ~%65, and still managing to put up some pretty good numbers, though I probably could have flown an airplane using just my cpu fan as an engine. Also, gears looked like someone was periodically sticking a wrench in the works for a second.

Now, the strange part is that, other than this issue, everything is working as well as one would expect, given the system specs (p4 dual-core intel w/ arch64, 1G ram, and the afforementioned card), and, with the old card, everything WAS working correctly, albeit lamely. I've tested this on a couple different environments (compiz, gnome, flux, and even twm), and with the 196 beta drivers available in AUR. Though performance (as far as benchmarking is concerned) fluctuates a little between environments and applications as you'd expect, the hang issue is a veritable constant. This interrupts everything, including video, making this unacceptable for an HTPC.

Is this a known issue, or, at the very least, an explainable one? If the latter, can I get a little help with the explaination (and eventual solving) aspect?

I submit this query, and more pressing ones, to the great minds of the ArchLinux forum

arkham · 2009-07-25 04:50:36

Please give us some more information, like /etc/rc.conf and /var/log/everything.log

djszapi · 2009-07-25 05:30:24

Welcome Sgt.Pepper on our forum!

"...the excitement of the UPS guy's recent visit,..." <- This isn't forum relevant information, and some too

Is it a fresh archlinux install or did it work earlier? Which version do you use from Xorg/kernel/drivers? Did you tried with the all relevant driver, nv, nvidia (older version too), and vesa?

Did you tried without any xorg.conf ? Did you tried with earlier version of xorg ?

Lastly, and Arkham has right when he ask you about logs.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-07-25 03:33:41

Nvidia: Disruptive choppiness, but, otherwise, working great....

#2 2009-07-25 04:50:36

Re: Nvidia: Disruptive choppiness, but, otherwise, working great....

#3 2009-07-25 05:30:24

Re: Nvidia: Disruptive choppiness, but, otherwise, working great....

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