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

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.

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

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 .

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

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.

hopefully others will now learn from my mistake.

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

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)