Compiz-Fusion + nVidia = choppiness?

S

syntx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2005
Messages
394
I had never run Linux with an ATI card before but this week
I tested some friend desktop with a X1400 (crappy).

I have a nVidia 8800GTS in my main computer
and running Gentoo x64. The ATI desktop is running also
Gentoo x64. Both systems are Q6600 with 4GB RAM (not that it matters).

Running Compiz-Fusion never gave me problems and I was always
happy with the performance. But now, side by side with the ATI system
I can see that the ATI seem to produce a much smoother animation.
I can't say it's faster since the Compiz benchmark and glxgears are
both slower than my 8800 but damn everything animates much better.

I am no Linux novice, so I highly doubt it's some magical settings I forgot
or inadvertently put in my xorg.conf.

To prove that I installed ubuntu 8.04 on both systems and ran
some tests and it confirms my findings.

Do any of you have had a similar experience?
Am I missing something?
 
I'm pretty happy with my nvidia's, whether it's my 6100 igp or 7300gt they seem fine - only effect I think is choppy is "show desktop". But truth be told I don't know anyone else using Compiz. I have found the Compiz forums a real help. Also, from what i've read the Nvidia drivers function much better with Compiz than Ati.

are you using the 173.14 drivers?

this post here might help http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=8012&highlight=choppy

also there's a couple older posts about 8xxx series cards
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=5951
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=6264
 
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this forum.

From many posts 8x00 series seem to have some issues...
 
My Ubuntu (with Compiz on max) is running fine on my GeforceFX 5600 256mb card (and AthlonXP 2800+)

But the latest Flash 9.0.124 suck nut. Full screen YouTube runs like slideshow, and normal screen is choppy. Fortunately I was able to locate an older rpm version of Flash 9.0.48.
 
yer flash10 got OGL speedup and it aint too bad for a binary blob - need 64bit binaries tho
 
eeyrjmr said:
yer flash10 got OGL speedup and it aint too bad for a binary blob - need 64bit binaries tho
Click to expand...

I'm thinking we'll be livin in a partial 32bit world untill 64bit Windows matters and I'm not seeing much movement that way. I can't complain too much cause my 32bit plugins work pretty well in my browser.
 
quoted from today's planetkde.org
Sebastian Kuegler

How NVidia impedes Free Desktop adoption.

There has been quite some discussion about Free and closed drivers and documentation of hardware lately. Kernel developers demand open drivers, docs and development processes, NVidia refuses to open their drivers, arguing that the technical quality is not a problem, and that the driver contains intellectual property they wish to protect. Now ATI/AMD has shown that the intellectual property argument is at least not universally applicable to graphics hardware vendors. Let's also clear up a misconception about the technical quality of nvidia.ko: The NVidia driver is the single component in a KDE4 / Free Operating system stack causing us most of the hard-to-solve problems. In other words, nvidia.ko has grave technical shortcomings.
The most considerate article in my opinion is James Bottomley's essay on "Linux Graphics, an essay about three drivers". James puts NVidia's position into the context of Free Software developers and Linux kernel developers more specifically. I'd like to reiterate some of his points and provide additional insight into how this looks like from the point of view of a KDE developer. With NVidia just confirming that they won't open up their process, this sadly appears necessary. Let me start with some problems of NVidia's closed driver model:
  • With an unclear licensing situation of those blobs, most distributors don't dare shipping nvidia.ko in their default install, spoiling the out of the box user experience that Linux is able to deliver otherwise.
  • Performance and stability problems as we see them with KDE4 (and apparently Cairo-based rendering as well) spoil the user experience even more (see below).
  • Triaging bugs caused by those issues is hard to do and takes a lot of our precious time. Even worse, NVidia doesn't seem to have the process in place to listen to those reports. nvforums seems to be the only way to reach NVidia people, it's hard to tell where to go with specific questions or technical issues. As a result, interchange between Free Software people and NVidia engineers leaves much to be desired
  • Users suffering from those problems will likely just blame Linux and try to not burn their fingers on Free Desktop systems anymore, let alone recommend it to others.
  • Not being able to help users with their problems caused by nvidia.ko is very frustrating, both for users who end up with a screwed system and developers not being able to help those users and still getting all the bad press.
Let's not forget to pin down at least some of the technical problems as detailed as possible. Two of the most annoying problems I am myself able to reproduce:
  • Temporary screen lockups. Suffering from this myself, I've done some research on the web. There were suggestions around that NVidia locks the system for some seconds when switching between powerstates. Disabling powermanagement through a kernel module parameter should have done the trick, it didn't do it here. Besides that, I would not feel comfortable with that, having a passively cooled video card and at least trying to not burn too much energy these days. Global climate change and local one (it's already quite hot in this room) getting in the way.
  • Bad windows resizing performance. Resizing a transparent konsole window takes approximately 5 seconds here. It's slightly better with a non-transparent mode (and other applications), but still far worse than on my ATI card, and also far worse than in KDE3. Switching virtual desktops here (composited or not) takes some seconds, just enough to break my flow of working.
(I've run into those problems with various different kernels, tried Ubuntu's last couple of release, same problems on OpenSuse). Currently, I'm now using the 177.13 driver, but I had the same problems with older versions as well. According to some, a lot of those problems have to do with the fact that NVidia drivers do not make use of the existing infrastructure in X (XRender, XAA, EXA) and Qt uses those quite heavily, if available (Qt4 much more than Qt3 apparently). Now imagine someone wanted to merge a driver upstream which works around those acceleration infrastructures. No way upstream developers accept it, and rightfully so. Why? Well, check out the above list of problems. The conclusion here would be that NVidia not only doesn't play by the rule of the game regarding licenses (it's still highly doubtful if nvidia.ko has legal problems), or by the development process (no docs, no sources), they also just write technically bad code (lacking support for those acceleration techniques, kernel oops statistics from James' essay). Reading comments of users over the Internet, there seem to be two patterns in the responses:
  • "My system works, so I don't understand those complaining about their Freedom. It's more important that it works than that it's free."
  • "It doesn't work, Linux sucks, I'll stick with Windows."
Both reactions show the problem from a very individual point of view -- which is fair enough. However, both opinions do not take into account the problems we, as Free Desktop developers run into. We have to waste a lot of time and end up frustrated because we're not able to support our product as good as we would like to. I can only guess about the reasons behind NVidia still being bone-headed as they are and not moving a bit. James brings up that they simply do not have the resources to support their product properly in a Free Software ecosystem. That seems the most logical explanation to me. Now resources in a company like NVidia have a lot to do with priorities, in turn, those priorities are often a function of market share. In this light, we end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Market share is kept low by Nvidia's poor support for the Free Desktop, which in turn makes them keep resources low for supporting those systems. So how can we solve this problem of not being able to support our users properly? There are in fact a number of ways:
  • NVidia's engineers could be more approachable to us.
  • Nvidia's engineers could pay more attention to the world outside their forums and actively engage with relevant developers to solve problems
  • We could recommend hardware from other vendors. Less nvidia cards around make for a smaller group of people running into those problems. Voting with your purse makes yourself a happier user and might, maybe, in the far-away future have people over at Nvidia read the writing on the wall.
As a Free Software developer, user and advocate, I feel screwed by NVidia, and as a customer, even more so. I would recommend not buying NVidia hardware at this point. For both political reasons, and for practical ones: Pretty much all other graphics cards around there work better with KDE4 than those requiring nvidia.ko. June 25, 2008 04:05 PM
Click to expand...
 
^^^ Yeah, what happened :confused:? Nvidia was The Choice for graphics when it came to building/buying a computer. Now you have AMD/ATI (who've gotten a bad rap from the Linux community for poor driver support) releasing documentation on their cards left and right (even the 4850 already works with the open source 'radeonhd' driver) and have vastly improved their proprietary drivers (they still suck, but support is leaps and bounds better than compared to last year). Also, Intel has opened up their drivers for a majority of their graphics hardware for quite a while, too.
 
GushpinBob said:
^^^ Yeah, what happened :confused:? Nvidia was The Choice for graphics when it came to building/buying a computer. Now you have AMD/ATI (who've gotten a bad rap from the Linux community for poor driver support) releasing documentation on their cards left and right (even the 4850 already works with the open source 'radeonhd' driver) and have vastly improved their proprietary drivers (they still suck, but support is leaps and bounds better than compared to last year). Also, Intel has opened up their drivers for a majority of their graphics hardware for quite a while, too.
Click to expand...

QFT nvidia rocked back in the days when beryl w/ emerald ruled the roost.
 
I'm trying to make my next graphics choice, and its very important to me that my card have quality 2d and 3d Linux support - I don't mind if I have to use a binary blob, as long as the damn thing WORKS.

At this point, is ATI actually in the lead in 3d applications (like Compiz, gaming and the like)? I get conflicting information that the open source driver is crap for 3d etc... I plan to use top of the line video hardware (ie. GTX200 series NV or latest 4000 series ATI).
 
google01103 said:
I remember not so long ago when Nvidia was the good guy 'cause their drivers worked
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what they had going for them, since it wasn't documentation of course. Their drivers were/are pretty poorly documented. The first time I tried to install Nvidia drivers in ubuntu way back when it just said "open terminal and type sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-(whatever the version was).run". They don't tell you that you have to cd to the folder the file is in which would confuse a lot of noobs, and they don't tell you that you can't be running xserver when you do it or how to get to a command line and kill xserver or how to configure xserver once you've installed the drivers. Pretty disappointing if you ask me. Why can't things be as well documented as Gentoo is?
 
Xaeos said:
I'm trying to make my next graphics choice, and its very important to me that my card have quality 2d and 3d Linux support - I don't mind if I have to use a binary blob, as long as the damn thing WORKS.

At this point, is ATI actually in the lead in 3d applications (like Compiz, gaming and the like)? I get conflicting information that the open source driver is crap for 3d etc... I plan to use top of the line video hardware (ie. GTX200 series NV or latest 4000 series ATI).
Click to expand...

Top of the line hardware, eh? Get the HD 4850 then. ATI provided Linux support the same day the card came out (which is surprising since ATI usually never does that). The latest open-source ati driver works with the card, but if you want 2D acceleration , 3D, and AIGLX (for compiz) support you'll have to use the proprietary fglrx for the time being (I heard ATI was generous enough to provide the Linux driver on the driver disc that ships with the card).
 
The nice thing with going with an ATI/AMD video card is that you have the choice to either use their proprietary video driver or the open source one.
Right now, I'm using the proprietary fglrx driver with my HD3870 and I'm having absolutely no problems. I have compiz/aiglx enabled and I can play opengl games (i only tried Doom 3 so far).
So, I'm happy and I'm glad that I bought an ATI/AMD video card. My next purchase will be the same.
 
I'm running OpenSUSE 11.0, and I definitely notice a choppiness with Compiz-Fusion, buts its tolerable. It ran sooo much better on Ubuntu 7.10, but this is a new version with the sphere (which is sex on a computer if you ask me) I have a xfx 7800 GS.
 
Cheetoz said:
is the refresh-rate set correctly in compiz settings?
Click to expand...
What would be a good refresh-rate? For some bizarre reason, OpenSUSE 11.0 will only do 24 bit color and my max refresh-rate is 54. Maybe that's the source of the problem for me. With all of the flavors of Linux I've tried I've never been able to go above 60.
 
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