Tuesday, August 19, 2008

nVidia driver : at last....

Good news for every nVidia user using the nVidia proprietary driver : most of the problems we had on GeForce 7 and 8 with nVidia proprietary driver seem to have been fixed in the latest nVidia driver release.
It's the release 177.67.

They are still marked as beta, but I think they're worth switching to them.

x86 64 bits : http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_177.67.html

x86 32 bits : http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_177.67.html

So every one suffering problems with 2D acceleration problems with nVidia proprietary driver should upgrade as soon as possible...

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fixed? At least not on integrated chipsets. I have a NVS 135M and the performance is still abysmal, perhaps even worse than before. :(

Anonymous said...

Scrolling and item/text selection and resizing somewhat, heve been improved...still slow...plasma worse than before

Pinaraf said...

Well, I'm sorry if it doesn't fix everything for you. I'm not a nVidia developer, I don't have anything to do with nVidia.
I own a nVidia GeForce 8600M, I had a lot of problems, most of them are fixed now. That's all... :/

Anonymous said...

Try reading this:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118088

There are few features to enable in the xorg.conf (not enabled by default in this beta) and a few lines about problems with KDE4.

Anonymous said...

Hi Pinaraf. I did not meant to criticise you at all. I apologise if you felt it this way. I merely wanted to say that unfortunately there are still some configurations on which there are severe problems. I know it is not your fault. :)

Anonymous said...

Hopefully these will fix my card too, thanks for posting :D

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info!

Just installed the driver and it got much, much faster!

Remember to follow the instructions in the link cafeina78 posted!

NVidia got my trust back! They really work on the issue!

Thanks NVidia folks!

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately not for me either =/

still, enabling the GlyphCache seems necessary for me. Else for example, when webpages required horizontal scrolling rendering speed is very very slow due to the full page refreshing

Anonymous said...

Wow! it looks lightning fast compared to previous drivers... but still slower than ATI apparently.
Great news for laptop users :)

Alexey Sergeev said...

Hope ATI will fix bug with video+compsite, because I was one of unlucky man who believe in kdeplanet lie about wonderfull ATI drivers and bought new ATI instead of nvidia.

Pinaraf said...

The problem with graphic cards is that if you want a GPU that can do heavy computation, with an usable API, a good 3D driver... under Linux, you've no choice : nVidia.
Intel has great GPU, but they are not powerful enough for what I want to do, AMD/ATI doesn't provide an usable API for their GPU and the only driver with good 3D acceleration, as far as I know, is the proprietary one that is as stable as a windows 98 beta release sometimes.

Anonymous said...

Well,

didn't work for me.

It is still very slow. Plasma, scrolling in Konqueror, complete Window redrawing after minimizing and so on.

All xorg and nvidia-settings applied. So well back to xorg-vesa.

GPU: Geforce 8600m-GT. Seems as mobile users have the biggest problems. Any 8600m-gt user for who this new driver fixes the performance?

DanielW

Pinaraf said...

It does for me (GeForce 8600M GT) and for johannol (same GPU)

Kevin Kofler said...

@Alexei Sergeyev: The good things you read about ATI are about the Free (as in speech) drivers (the radeon driver which comes with X.Org X11 and the DRI drivers which go with it), not the proprietary driver (which is even worse than the nVidia one). The Free drivers have stable 3D/OpenGL and XRender support for up to r4xx, which is cards <= X1050 (with X850 actually being the most powerful one, X1050 is just a marketing number), and there are now experimental 3D drivers for r5xx (all the other X* cards), they're available as a Fedora 9 update (probably the first distribution to ship them). XRender 2D acceleration support for r5xx has been available for a few more months, so your distribution might already ship that one. As far as I know, r6xx chips (HD* cards) don't have a Free 3D driver yet, nor XRender acceleration because r6xx doesn't have a separate 2D core anymore, so 3D has to be implemented to do 2D acceleration. So if you bought one of those, you're out of luck at the moment, you should have researched more carefully. Unaccelerated 2D should be working fine for all Radeons these days though.

Alexey Sergeev said...

@Kevin Kofler
Thank you for explanations.
I have HD card and I'm really unlucky,
because nvidia drivers were fixed two weeks after I bought it.

What about development status for Open Ati drivers for HD*? Where could I track it?

Kevin Kofler said...

There are 2 projects running for ATI Radeon r5xx/r6xx drivers, as far as I know they use the same kernel DRM driver (note that DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager, nothing to do with Digital Restrictions Management, Digital Rights Mutilation or however you want to call that DRM), but the X.Org X11 drivers are separate. As far as I know, the radeon driver was the one which got r5xx acceleration working first (radeonhd now also supports it, using the same kernel DRM driver), but radeonhd might well end up getting r6xx working first, so it makes sense to track the progress of both.

xorg-driver-ati mailing list for ati/radeon
radeonhd mailing list

From time to time, Dave Airlie, one of the developers of the radeon driver, posts news to his blog.