Qball's Weblog

NVidia and poor performance.

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I’ve recently (+- 1 month ago) I replaced my ati X550 (64mb) PCI-E video card with a NVidia GeForce 7100GS (128mb onboard, and uses upto 512 mb using system memory). Both cards are fanless (I don’t like noise-making fan’s)
This does fix the main problem I had with the ati card: Overlay only working when I kept my mouse pointer on the left monitor, and it also had terrible distortion on the bottom of the video overlay.

But, I’ve expected this nvidia card to have better opengl performance, and be capable of running beryl smoothly. And composite. Nothing is less true.

In Torcs I got around 50-60fps @ 1280×1024 at the best quality settings with the x550, nvidia does only 20-24  in compatibility mode @ 1024×768 (in best mode, there are allot of rendering artifacts and fps < 10).

Beryl runs, but very slow..  if I compare it with my laptop (T42 ibm, having a 9600 pro mobile with  64mb dedicated ram running @ 1400x1050), it’s pathetic..  Even when I switch to nvidia to 1 monitor only (1280x1024).

The benchmark utility in beryl gets 30 fps on the nvidia (using aiglx), and when doing anything else it drops fast.. On my laptop (xgl)  300fps, this is a factor 10!!!!!! higher. (I checked, both running the same settings).

Now I  don’t really mind sub-par opengl performance, I hardly play games, but currently I can’t even play with a composite manager without noticing slowdowns…

So any tips are welcome, it was a resonably cheap card and if the only solution is to replace it, I might do it.</p> <p> Please mail me tips, suggestions, suggestions for what card to get, and where to get it cheap (I need 1xdvi 1xdsub PCI-E). Email is: qball_@_qballcow.nl (remove _) </p>

Q