New card makes no difference

[tyreth]

Hi,

I just bought a Geforce FX 5200 (not ultra) because I wanted a cheap fps increase for the next few months. This was to replace my Geforce 2 MX400.

I expected when I bought it that I'd see some change in speed. For a few hours I thought it had changed, because I used a higher res and it seemed to run pretty well. Then I became skeptical, and tried it with my old card, and it seemed almost the same!

So I ran some tests, comparing against windows. Card A is my Geforce 2, Card B is my Geforce FX. I was running Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. I chose two locations to view from, and chose a specific point to look at, and checked what the fps was. I used the same resolution and graphics settings in windows and linux. The first is the fps from location a, the second (after the /) is from location b)

Windows Card A - 34/16
Windows Card B - 44/25
Linux Card A - 21/11
Linux Card B - 22/12

As you can see, there's almost no difference in speed in Linux! And it's a lot slower than Windows in both cases. When in a location that has a higher FPS (~40+), card b showed a difference of 5, maybe 7fps, but that's usually the most.

My computer is an Athlon t-bird 1.33ghz CPU, with 320Mb SDRAM. My motherboard is an Asus A7V133.

This is the output from various proc files:
/proc/driver/nvidia/version:
NVRM version: NVIDIA Linux x86 nvidia.o Kernel Module 1.0-4496 Wed Jul 16 19:03:09 PDT 2003
GCC version: gcc version 3.2.

/proc/driver/nvidia/cards/0:
Model: GeForce FX 5200
IRQ: 11
Video BIOS: 04.34.20.22.00
Card Type: AGP

/proc/driver/nvidia/agp/card:
Fast Writes: Supported
SBA: Supported
AGP Rates: 4x 2x 1x
Registers: 0x1f000217:0x1f000314

/proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge:
Host Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133]
Fast Writes: Supported
SBA: Supported
AGP Rates: 4x 2x 1x
Registers: 0x1f000217:0x00000314

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

I can't think what more information to include. It was originally using AGPGART I believe, but I removed that from the kernel to try the nvidia agp.

[tyreth]

Ah, just read another thread, here's some additional information I hadn't included.

My distribution is Gentoo, using the 2.4.21 kernel.

Attached is XF86 log file.

[tyreth]

And here's my XF86Config file.