DXTC/S3TC support on Debian Sarge (testing)

[tassilo]

Hello,

I'm running Debian Sarge (testing) with kernel 2.4.18 and the newest Nvidia drivers. My problem is that I'd like to play Unreal Tournament 2003, but the self compiled Nvidia driver doesn't seem to support the DXTC/S3TC. In the README of UT is written, that only the binary drivers of Nvidia support this feature, but there are no binarys for Debian.
So what are the possibilities? Is there a way to get UT running, perhaps with a rpm-binary installed with alien?

Hope you can help me.

[bwkaz]

The "binary drivers from nvidia" do not refer to precompiled drivers. The ones you create with either apt-get nvidia-kernel-src and apt-get nvidia-glx-src, followed by a compile, are binary drivers. Anything you install from nVidia is going to be a binary driver, even from the .tar.gz drivers (the ones I use -- and I can run UT2k3).

What error are you getting? Can you post your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file as well? (I'd ask for XF86Config(-4), but with the log file, that isn't needed).

[tassilo]

The Error message is:
OpenGL renderer relies on DXTC/S2TC support.

History:

Exiting due to error

My XFree86.0.log is attached at this posting.

Thanks so far,
Tassilo

[bwkaz]

Well just about the only thing that seems out of the ordinary is the message about failing to verify AGP usage. But I wouldn't think that that would stop the drivers from working...

Anyway, what does either lspci or cat /proc/pci tell you about your motherboard chipset? Or do you know offhand what it is? It may be, seeing as you have forced NvAgp, that the NvAgp AGP driver doesn't recognize your chipset and therefore disables AGP.

But again, that shouldn't disable S3TC...

What does cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version tell you?

It might also be something with TwinView, though I doubt it. Since you only have one monitor connected anyway, why don't you try removing (or commenting would be better, actually) the TwinView stuff in XF86Config(-4) and restarting X?

What does glxinfo | grep s3tc tell you?

Edit: just thought of something else. The ut2003 executable could be linking against the wrong libGL.so file... although nothing in the System directory ever seems to be linking against a libGL as far as I can tell. But the OpenGLDrv.so driver might be dynamically dlopen()ing it at runtime, which wouldn't show up when I ldd the files (which is what I was doing). ANYWAY, look around on your system for any stray libGL.so (or libGL.a) files that might be non-nVidia ones. I don't know the search path that OpenGLDrv.so uses, so there's really no way to check it that way...

[tassilo]

I've got it.
In my XF86Config-4 I chose NvAGP, but in my kernel there's AGPART active. With AGPART it works quite fine.
And I made some Changes in the os-registry.c of the NV-kernel driver. I enabled Fast Writes and SBA (which actually doesn't work) but Fast Writes does. Then I recompiled the kernel driver.

Perhabs anybody can tell me why SBA doesn't work. I set the option in os-registry.c to "1", recompiled and installed, but "cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status" tells me that it is disabled.

I've got a Nvidia GeForce 4 Go 440 with 64MB in my notebook.

Ok, thank you all for your help.

[bwkaz]

Good!

Originally posted by tassilo
Perhabs anybody can tell me why SBA doesn't work. I set the option in os-registry.c to "1", recompiled and installed, but "cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status" tells me that it is disabled. What do /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/card and the host-bridge file in the same directory tell you about SBA? If one or the other of those tells you it's not possible, then it won't be, regardless of what you tell the drivers to do in os-registry.c. Your choices in os-registry are, after all, checked against reality. ;)

If the "card" file says it's unsupported or whatever, then the video card is the problem -- unlikely, but possible. If the host-bridge file says it's unsupported, then the problem is that your AGP chipset is reporting that it can't support it.

The files in /proc/driver/nvidia just report what the hardware is saying (for the most part), too.

[tassilo]

The host-bridge supports SBA, but not the card.

Not bad, every game I tested works fine, mostly better than under Win.

Thanks you,

Tassilo