Instability

[uberpenguin]

I'm new to these forums, so if this has already been posted; please forgive me.

I have a GF2 TI in my SMP Linux machine, and I have been experiencing hangs and crashes of my system (not just X, the systems stops responding even to the network). This primarily happens when I'm using a GLX application (UT2003, some Xscreensaver, etc), but it has occurred during normal 2D use. This disturbed me greatly, and even more so when I found out that a few of my friends (and others in the online community) have been experiencing similar issues especially with VIA chipsets (mine is an Apollo Pro 133A). I originally let this go, but it's getting more annoying every time it happens, and now I'm to the point where I only use the nvidia driver when I want to play a game and the X 'nv' driver the rest of the time. I'm convinced there is nothing wrong with the hardware or software. My friend (who runs windows and has an ATI card) and I swapped video cards for a month and neither of us had problems, so I'm convinced this is a driver problem.

My question is, are you aware of this problem, is there a way to improve it, and do you plan to fix it?

This has become almost unbearable and I'm thinking about getting a different video card.

Thanks,
-uberpenguin

[Andy Mecham]

Does disabling AGP help your stability? You can disable by adding Option "NvAgp" "0"to your XF86Config file.

--andy

[uberpenguin]

Disabling AGP, eh? I'll try it for awhile, but won't that adversely affect my GL performance?

-uberpenguin

[Andy Mecham]

In some cases, yes. However, AGP is one of the top causes of instability for certain chipsets. Have you tried switching between AGPGART and NVAGP?

--andy

[bwkaz]

Only if the GL programs in question use so much texture memory that they overflow the on-the-video-card DDR RAM. The GF2 Ti -- do those have 32MB of memory, or 64?

Are you using DVI by any chance? If so, then switching to analog may work without disabling AGP.

[uberpenguin]

Thanks, i'll try that too, I'm currently using AGPGART

-uberpenguin

[uberpenguin]

64 MB onboard RAM, analog monitor, no DVI. I also have about 64 or 128 shared RAM configured in my BIOS settings.

Here are my other relevant specs:

EPoX D3VA MoBo (VIA Apollo Pro 133A)
(2) PIII 1.0GHz B CPUs
2 GB PC133 SDRAM

-uberpenguin