[TriLUG] Re: LUG: problems whith X

[Daniel T. Chen]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Donald Ball wrote:

> i have. i have an nvidia card, i use the 1541 drivers, and i typically
> experience a kernel crash within 20 minutes of starting any program that
> heavily relies on 3d acceleration (unreal tournament, tribes2, tuxracer).
> i'm hopeful that this will cease to be an issue when nvidia issues a
> release specifically for mandrake-8.2. but if anyone has any brilliant
> suggestions in the meantime, i'm all ears. booting into windows to play
> games sucks.

I've never had success with Nvidia's binary-only drivers. I see the exact
same symptoms on both Intel and VIA chipsets.

As a regular in #nvidia on irc.openprojects.net, I can suggest the usual:
Try agpgart instead of nvgart (Option "NVAgp" "2" in XF86Config-4 under
Section "Screen"). Try disabling agp and any additional params like Fast
Writes and Sideband Addressing (if your motherboard supports these
options).

As a last resort, I know for a fact that disabling 2d acceleration in X
causes the random hangs to go away with the binary-only drivers, 
regardless of what agp mode, agp/nv-gart, etc. However, it is painfully
slow. Never tried 3d under those conditions.

You should also not see the hangs with the "nv" driver.

FWIW, I bought a Radeon and donated the GeForce2MX to a Windows user.

---
Dan Chen                 crimsun at email.unc.edu
GPG key: www.cs.unc.edu/~chenda/pubkey.gpg.asc