nforce2 + gforce3 + Red Hat 8 = not fun

[tdawg]

ok....
i compiled the nforce drivers for sound and lan, that worked.
i compiled the display drivers, that worked.
i modified all the necessary files. that worked
lan, audio work but X sucks balls. glk gears throws only about 1300 FPS....which isn't what good for a Athlon xp 2100+ with one gig pc2700 ram. any helps in how to remedy this?

[etr]

I'm not familiar with glk gears, but if you have having performance problems with 3D acceleration, I would check to see if AGP is enabled. The easiest way to do this is with the following command:

cat /proc/drivers/nvidia/agp/status

If AGP is not enabled, anything geometry-intensive can be expected to perform poorly. Problems in getting AGP working with nForce 1/2 boards usually involve kernel configuration issues. Given the relative age of your board, there may also be problems with using earlier driver versions.

What kernel version are you running (and is it stock or custom), and what version of the drivers are you using?

[tdawg]

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status
Status: Enabled
Driver: NVIDIA
AGP Rate: 4x
Fast Writes: Disabled
SBA: Disabled


Linux kernel 2.4.18-14 on Red Hat 8.0
the nforce version is: Version: 1.0-0248
the display driver (for my Gforce3): 1.0-4191
My mobo is an Epox 8RDA+

Now, i've been having memory issues lately, this is running mozilla, gaim, and xmms...and pretty much nothing else (http, smb, named, etc...)
cat/proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 1031032 kB
MemFree: 108324 kB
Buffers: 31904 kB
Cached: 681692 kB

[bwkaz]

You have 780MB effectively free. How is that a memory problem?

[mmesh]

To: tdawg

Hi!

I also have an EpoX 8RDA+ mobo and Red Hat 8 (freshly installed - newby in Linux) but I can't configure the sound.
I tried installing rpm downloaded from the nvidia site but I still don't have any sound.

Could You please explain me the procedure or at least point me to the link where I can find out more?

THNX!

[CSlayeR]

This day will be the 7th day i am still working on starting my X with nvidia's accelerated drivers but with no success.. i got one big black screen when i hit startx or gdm

No errors in /var/log/XFree86.0.log .. last log is AGP8x sucessfully started.. I can restart the computer with Ctrl-Alt-Del but after i got the black screen i can not kill X server or get one text console

Now i am thinking to change the mainboard 8RDA+ for something else ...

[Delleon]

tdawg, try loading the nvidia driver with these options:
modprobe nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1 NVreg_ReqAGPRate=4
I have an NForce2 motherboard with a Geforce4 and an Athlon XP 2100+ and I get nearly 4000FPS with glxgears.

CSlayeR, I had the same problem initially, but was able to get mine working eventually. Have you tried throttling your AGP down to 2x or 4x? (modprobe nvidia NVreg_ReqAGPRate=2) What is your AGP aperture size set to in your BIOS? What kind of motherboard do you have and which AGP driver are you using, AGPgart or NVagp?

[CSlayeR]

My configuration:
8RDA+
Athon XP 2600+
Geforce 4 Ti 4200 Abit 8x
Latest bios
AGP Aperture Size 128

(modprobe nvidia NVreg_ReqAGPRate=2)
I tried even on =1 value .. on everything .. just blank screen.
For be does not work... i do not know why


:( I tried everything on this forum but no success . This is not the first time i install the Nvidia Drivers ... just the mainboard + cpu and the gpu are new ... :)

[tooly]

Hi CSlayeR,

i think with latest Bios you mean 3305?
I has no luck with this Bios, so i downgrade to 3129 and now i can start x and my System work fine.

mfg
tooly

[Ralph Scharpf]

Hi,

I have also some problems with my EP-8RDA+, but I managed to get it running. My basic problem is a too low GLX performance and of course the bad sound and just a little better ethernet driver.

The "black screen with character" effect seem to be caused by the latest BIOS version. This version can easily be identified by a printout which tells you that dual memory bus support has been enabled.

All other BIOS ver from Epox seem to work fine but the performance of GLX is not optimal.

On
http://sdb.suse.de/cgi-bin/sdbsearch.cgi?stichwort=geforce&searchtype=and

can be found an estimated list with performance values. Here you can see that gears with an GeForce4 should reach up to 7000FPS. My working PC reaches with an GeForce2 1500 FPS, my EP-8RDA+ only 850FPS.

The sound driver is very bad, with 2.4.20 Kernels it works per default without patchig.

I did a network driver test with another computer, tested to be able to transmit 100MBit/s. With ping -f -s 1024 only 2000 packets/s were transmitted. A good value would be about 8000.

It seems there is really a lot of work to be done for Linux nforce2 support.

Has anybody tested other boards than EP-8RDA+? Perhaps it is more a BIOS problem than a driver problem?