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Have you tried regenerating your Xorg.conf using nvidia-xconfig?

Maybe the nvidia script will catch something you’ve missed….

By atomopawn on Apr 14, 2008

This is a known problem especially with 8/9 series nvidia gfx cards. There is no known fix and nvidia has not acknowledged the problem.

3d performance might be improved slightly but desktop performance on these cards is appalling. The latest beta (173.08) has some 2d and 3d perfromance regressions on top of that (for some people)

you could try :

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

but the difference is fairly negligible.

The best suggestion is to stick with the 7900 (which is probably faster anyways) unless of course you need dx10 ;P

By txf on Apr 14, 2008

you can put:
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords=”PerfLevelSrc=0×2222″

in your /etc/modprobe.d/options. it disables powermizer and makes the card stay at highest possible frequency. you can turn off sync to vblank in “xserver xvideo settings” and “opengl settings” in nvidia xserver settings and trade a noticeable performane increase for horrible tearing in videos. for some reason InitialPixmapPlacement=0 works best for me (based on showfps of kde4) and GlyphCache=1 doesnt work at all. (i get “ERROR: Error parsing assignment ‘GlyphCache=1′ (Unrecognized attribute name).”)

By kef on Apr 14, 2008

Regarding the composite desktop: Try disabling direct rendering in “Desktop Effects” > “Advanced Options”.

I don’t know why but indirect rendering makes kwin-composite and compiz run smoothly here (6800 go).

– bedahr

By bedahr on Apr 14, 2008

Oh, I forgot …to use glyph cache you need 171.06
or 173.08 (if it works for you without performance issues)…pixmapplacement exitsts for 169 series tho.

initialpixmapplacement=0 forces pixmaps to reside in system memory.

whereas setting it at 2 creates pixmaps in vidmem (glyph cache only works with it set at 2)

In theory it should be faster to make them in vidmem (less pixmap copying back and forth)

By txf on Apr 14, 2008

Thanks for the info, I’ll make sure to stay away from nvidia 8/9 series graphics cards

By k on Apr 15, 2008

The 8600 line really seems like a lemon to me. My (near-completely unqualified) advice: plug the 7900 back in and sell the 8600. I was under the impression that a 7900 was a much faster card than an 8600(isn’t it?). I’d snap up a 7900 in an instant if I could find one and I had any money left after buying 2 video cards I’m utterly disappointed with in close succession.

my main 8600 complaints:
1. TVOut. In Windows there’s just a bit of underscan, in Linux there’s a LOT of overscan(way more than is tolerable, yay for MPlayer hacks, boo for Nvidia). With my 8600gt through svideo, the TVOverScan xorg.conf option has zero effect (the Windows control panel options for this also don’t work, not that I use TVOut in Windows). The equivalent nvidia-settings option doesn’t work either. Googling (back when I first bought the card) suggests this is an issue with the whole 8xxx line. And let’s not forget the fact that Nvidia doesn’t deem Linux worthy of a TVout position control (even on cards that aren’t defectively regressive).

2. DPMS. Instead of turning off my monitor, my 8600gt seems to love putting my monitor into a loop of going on off, on off, on off. Assuming of course the current viewport has no open windows and it actually gets as far as actaully turning off my monitor and not just putting it into some unsupported mode that just displays scan lines and monitor-firmware-based error messages.

3. Compiz. There’s a specific graphical corruption issue[1] with Firefox (and possibly another, but possibly it’s the same issue, which I’ve experienced(along with at least 1 other person) with graphical corruption of terminal windows that only happens when switching to another viewport and back). These issues only seem to affect 8600 cards. Last I checked there might be a fix(Option “UseCompositeWrapper”), but I haven’t yet installed Compiz again since the last time. At least 1 person reports no change with the “fix”.

4. 2d performance. My old AGP 6600gt seems better at rendering 2d than my PCI-express 8600gt. It’s not all bad though, I bought an HD3650 hoping to get rid of my lemon - the lemon blows its doors off in 2d AND 3d (w/ 169.12 & fglrx 8.3).

FWIW, in glxgears with the ATI card(fglrx 8.3 and no xorg.conf options set), I was getting around 5000fps. My 8600gt gets around 9500fps, it has 512MB of ddr3 btw(as does the HD3650). If you have a non-gt/x/s 8600 with ddr2, 5000fps might be all you can expect (but that statement is pure speculation, 1/2 the performance of a similar, if not identical, card seems a bit much).

Anyway, my position - fuck 8600 cards. They get great 3d performance for the money(well…for some of us anyway!), but from where I’m sitting they aren’t worth the hassle. Oh how I yearn to part with mine.

I keep coming back to memories of bygone days on Windows when I was stuck using the same aging driver for my 6600gt because it was the only one that would remember my TVout size/position settings. It seems quite clear to me that that issue and the TVout overscan issue I’m having now are completely different, but those memories really seem like an omen, screaming at me to never buy Nvidia products again. While for the moment I’m just as unimpressed with the ATI card as the Nvidia, I’m glad I’ve got an ATI card on the shelf that will, someday soon, allow me to stop giving a shit about crappy video drivers released by companies that obviously have zero business writing software. Anyway this whole post is more rant than it is constructive input so I’ll stop writing now.

[1] http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=6742

By he who hates his 8600gt on Apr 15, 2008

Oh dear god. I was hoping I’d made some major configuration mistake. I’m seeing performance with a PCI-E 8600 which is inferior to an AGP Geforce 4 bought for a similar amount 5 years ago. I read reviews that said it was slow, but reasonable for the cost, which I took to mean “you’ll be able to play WoW”, not “haha! sucker! 4fps is your upper limit from now on![1]”.

I guess I’ll have to madly try all the suggested tweaks and see if anything improves.

Well, sorry to hijack the thread with a rant, I just can’t believe how bad this card is.

*cry*

[1]That’s what I’m getting in the login screen. The GeForce 4 (with a massively inferior CPU) managed about 20fps. I want my AGP slot back. Especially since I have an AGP 7800 just sitting around.

By Aneurin Price on Apr 16, 2008

Apologies for adding more noise, but I found this interesting so I thought I’d share. It seems the situation is far less bad than I thought, and really odd. A table to demonstrate (and I hope it comes out formatted to be understandable):

GLXGears WoW (wine d3d) WoW (wine opengl)
7950 fps: ~17000 ~20 ~80
8600 fps: ~2500 [0] ~4 ~100 (!)

This is all with desktop effects turned off, and the rest of the components in the two systems aren’t the same - it’s the relative performance at different things that I’m interested in.

So for WoW in opengl I have no reason to complain, but this result really surprises me. It would be interesting to see the effect of different drivers, but now that it’s working I don’t want to *touch* it :P.

[0] I’m sure it was more like 5000 last night…

By Aneurin Price on Apr 17, 2008

I might try downgrading to the 100 series drivers, but I was under the impression that xrender acceleration for 8 series seriously sucked before 169 came along (it sucks less, but still sucks).

…sigh, for x64 I have to patch the kernel module to work with recent kernels…so much effort

By txf on Apr 17, 2008

I am really surprised:

On a double card (nvidia, intel) environment, with started pekwm and a gtk2 application (flashplayer in fullscreen) running glxgear on a nvidia PCI (not PCIe) card the 100.14.19 compared to the 171.06 brings this:

100.14.19:
3731 frames in 5.0 seconds = 746.183 FPS
3902 frames in 5.0 seconds = 779.827 FPS
4006 frames in 5.0 seconds = 800.569 FPS
3888 frames in 5.0 seconds = 777.003 FPS

171.06:
1552 frames in 5.0 seconds = 310.305 FPS
1525 frames in 5.0 seconds = 304.787 FPS
1696 frames in 5.0 seconds = 338.910 FPS
1541 frames in 5.0 seconds = 307.941 FPS

I am using the modprobe.d/nvidia (options).

I couldn’t believe that…

Thanks for the suggestion.

By Mike on May 22, 2008

Hi!

glx gears does say nothing at all considering actual 3d performance

at first i was a bit fooled by the glxgears numbers, but ingame the new driver performed much better the stable on.

At least that’s what i’m experiencing!

Still gl,

mingy

By mingy on May 24, 2008