Bad NvidiaLinux driver

The poor NvidiaLinux driver-general Linux technology-Linux technology and application information. For more information, see the following. Nvidia's Linux driver has not been widely praised, and ATI's Linux driver has always been bad.

However, the current situation seems to have changed.

If you are using a new Nvidia graphics card, such as the 8000 and 9000 Series, you may encounter the following problems:

When Firefox browses some websites, It is very stuck (for example, http://www.tuaw.com); it is also very stuck when switching tabs.

The window size of the application is very slow. The KDE 4/Qt 4 program is basically unusable. Although Compiz can be run smoothly, some special effects will be very slow, including resizing the window.

Well, maybe you have been complaining about Firefox's poor performance. KDE 4 is slow, but it is not. The culprit is Nvidia's Linux driver ......

Both the 169, 173, and the latest 177 beta drivers have poor 2D performance on the 8000 and 9000 series graphics cards. 3D performance is perfect, so you can play Doom smoothly, but you cannot browse the webpage smoothly.

For details, refer to the Nvnews forum post:

NVidia 8000/9000 Series Performance Issues

From the above post, we can see that there are a lot of people suffering, and even some 7000 and GT200 series graphics cards.

Temporary mitigation
Of course, the best situation is that Nvidia can hear the voice of Linuxer, correct this serious bug in the new version of the driver, and have to wait for now. The vulnerabilities of the closed source driver are fully presented ......

Foreign netizens tried some settings to alleviate the above problems. If you are troubled by the above problems, you can try it. The effect varies greatly with different video cards, but there will be a lot of improvements in general.

First, install the latest 177 beta driver and then try to run:

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

If you are using the 177 driver and running the desktop, you can run this command directly in the terminal window without restarting X.

My video card is 8600GTS. After running the above command, the window zoom performance becomes acceptable. If it works for you, you can add the above command ~ /. Xinitrc.

In addition, you can add the following to Section "Device" in xorg. conf:

Option "PixmapCacheSize" "300000"
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"

Then restart X. Here, after restarting X, the phenomenon of dragging the webpage card in Firefox is greatly mitigated.

If you want to run KDE 4 smoothly, refer:

Http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/GPU-Performance

The options supported by the video card after 8000 are also listed above. You can try to enable the options to see the effect:

Options that are said to work well on 8xxx cards but are untested (by me)

Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Enabled by default
Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
Enables triple buffering. "Decreases the time an application stallwhile waiting for vblank events, but increases latency slightly" (NVIDIA Readme)
Option "DamageEvents" "True"
Recommended by NVIDIA if running composite + glx, increases performance, enabled by default
Option "UseCompositeWrapper" "True"
Enables the X server's composite wrapper instead of the builtin one.
Option "AllowIndirectPixmaps" "True"
Cocould improve hardware rendering on G80 + cards with more than 256 MB of video memory.
Option "BackingStore" "True"
Cache overlayed areas in case they get redisplayed later
Option "PixmapCacheSize" "200000"
Allocate said number of pixels for pixmap caches

You can also pay attention to the previous Nvnews posts on a regular basis. The above will also update some of the latest solutions. You can also set your video card model, and post the effects of the above measures to share them.

Nvidia or ATI?
I don't know what will happen if I don't have an ATI Video card, but as the author of the above Nvnews post said, he helped a friend install a ATI Video Card on Linux and "... the performance was amazing all round. 2D/3D Linux/Windows, everything ".

It seems that the situation is indeed changing. Although Nvidia graphics has some advantages in 3D performance on Linux, 2D performance is the key to daily applications, and ATI drivers are constantly improving, 3D performance is also greatly improved than before.

If you are about to run Linux and do not play 3D games on Linux every day, ATI is a better choice than Nvidia at least before Nvidia fixes this bug.

Source: LinuxGEM