GF8200 / Poor 2D performance / ETA of fix?

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by Linuxhippy

The driver got a major 2D overhaul between 173 and 182, moving from a mostly-software to an mostly-hardware accalerated architecture.
In fact the 182 drivers provide currently best-in-class 2D accaleration, better than all the praised open-source drivers (intel included).

I wouldn't conclude the dirver is "the driver is so fundamentally flawed" just because there is one problem with one program (flash) which even only shows up when running compiz.
Yes, this is most likely a bug. But its clearly not armageddon
What makes me a bit angry however is the lack of communication with Nvidia. Just something like "we were able to reproduce it and filed a bug" would help a great deal.

- Clemens

Those 182 driver might work magic, but I don't see them listed yet

Compiz IS disabled and we still have easy examples of Flash that play rather acceptably with 173 and essentially not at all with 177.180. I am NOT talking about YouTube, I am talking Hi-def from Hulu, or even not hi-def from The Daily Show.

So when we are significantly better off WITHOUT the HW acceleration, I'd say thats a fairly fundamental flaw For the 8200 we are better off with VESA or 173 than using 177/180 under linux (under Windows the performance is very good)

Please read more thoroughly before writing off our concerns.

[Space]

Yep. I'm not using flash most of the time (since the time flashblock was released for galeon) especially not for watching videos. If I want to watch a video I use my VDR, not flash!

EDIT: What I am talking about is my login manager (gdm) showing the login screen in slow motion (it takes ~2 seconds to draw the image starting from the top going to the bottom). And after logging in it's all the applications (xterm, gnome-terminal, galeon --> scrolling --> screen refresh which takes 2 seconds to draw from top to bottom and cpu usage of >90% for X). And this happens with every driver >173.14.15 ... so it is a fundamental regression which needs to get fixed. As soon as ATI provides something like VDPAU and this issue is still not fixed then I will sell this board and buy me an ATI one.

Best regards,

Space

[Linuxhippy]

Originally Posted by kralizec

What it happens is that flash seems to be the most demanding (and popular) 2D application out there.

Not at all, really. Flash does all its rendering with the CPU only, and finally uploads the result to screen. A really demanding and popular 2D application is firefox for example.

If someone knows of a performance test to run, I would be happy to try it with different configurations, and let you know the results. I have tested several options related to the pixmap cache size, and none of them worked.

I quite common tool is gtkperf.

- Clemens

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by Linuxhippy

Not at all, really. Flash does all its rendering with the CPU only, and finally uploads the result to screen.

are you saying the GPU is not involved? (how does changing from 173 to 177 make such a dramatic difference.. 20-30 fps with 173, less than 2 fps with 177/180)

[Linuxhippy]

Originally Posted by zim2dive

are you saying the GPU is not involved? (how does changing from 173 to 177 make such a dramatic difference.. 20-30 fps with 173, less than 2 fps with 177/180)

I did not say its not involved - its just very likely that it doesn't do a lot when watching video because most is done by the CPU anyway (it only displays images renderd by the CPU). So maybe the upload paths in the driver got somehow mangled, and flash is now hitting some ugly fallback-cases.
However, 173. was the last driver with the poor 2D accaleration, maybe it has something to do with pixmaps beeing allocated in vram by default.

- Clemens

[AaronP]

Could somebody with this problem please generate and attach a verbose bug report by following the instructions in the sticky post? Thanks!

[Windseeker]

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125206

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by AaronP

Could somebody with this problem please generate and attach a verbose bug report by following the instructions in the sticky post? Thanks!

As linked by Windseeker, I believe I already have (if not, I'm happy to give it another shot). Internal to nVidia check with Roland H.. he's had the bug report for ~ 2 weeks. Not sure if he was able to replicate.

thanks,
Mike

[AaronP]

That bug report doesn't have the verbose log I need. Please generate a new one after starting X with "startx -- -logverbose 6".

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by AaronP

That bug report doesn't have the verbose log I need. Please generate a new one after starting X with "startx -- -logverbose 6".

Will get this after work.. anyone else can a report here faster, feel free.

[zim2dive]

Ok, started up.. did a stop on gdm and a startx with supplied params... report attached.

[AaronP]

Thank you, zim2dive. I believe I've determined the problem, but please do one more thing to verify: Run "nvidia-settings -q BusRate".