Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael
Anyone else interested? Anyone have their own experiences they would like to share on NVIDIA's 2D performance (or there the lack of)?
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Yes, I have 8600M GS in my laptop and have an extremely bad performance with Ubuntu 8.04. First of all it's slow, especially text scrolling in gnome-terminal. When using Midnight Commander, trying to view/edit files is very painful. nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 (-a GlyphCache=1 doesn't work for some reason, there's no such setting in my case) helps with that, but somehow it manages to totally screw all the rest of my system, especially when I switch between windows. It's as if active window has cached fonts and everything is fast, but as soon as I switch to another window all the caches are dropped and nvidia starts rendering it cold. Note that all of this happens even without compiz. Compiz makes it worse. Compiz+Emerald make it unbearable, the delays are two and more seconds, and what's the most funny part, become noticeable without InitialPixmapPlacement=2.
The latest 173.14 and 177.13 drivers added another bug to the mix: in gnome-terminal (and in Midnight Commander) when you edit a file and move your cursor it often leaves "trails" in its old positions and not always draws itself in its new position. Editing files is even more pain, you don't even know where you have your cursor at the moment! Press Ctrl+L and suddenly you could notice it's in the wrong line/column. Enabling TripleBuffering helps, but not always. It's still happening sometimes.
Plus I've got an impression that 173.14/177.13 drivers have even more performance problems than 169.12 that is shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.
Additionally, for quite some time I was attributing the slowness to Firefox 3.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 (I had performance problems on windows with early firefox alphas) and have been thinking anything from "why the hell firefox on windows works so much faster than on windows" to "what the hell did they break in Ubuntu 8.04 this time to make Linux so unbearably slow". That was until I switched to nv driver, which had absolutely no performance problems as far as I've seen. Of couse it doesn't have 3d acceleration (and some dithering problems) though, which is a showstopper for me and forces me to get back to Vista.
Even worse is that a lot of people who scream "nvidia drivers work perfectly for me" might not even now they have the problem. They might think this is how it is supposed to work. You can spot performance problems only in the extremes on when comparing it with something else. And if they had neither it looks as if it's ok.
All this means that it might force me and some of my friends (who don't even care for Linux but might want to try it some time in the future) to avoid NVIDIA like a fire next time. Some already did and decided to wait for the next ATI for their next upgrade. Their reputation of good Linux support turned out to be fake and I hope that more and more people will realise that.
Plus what they don't realise is that their bad reputation on Linux causes their
Windows users to reconsider buying from them next time. Just because they might want to try Linux. I can't imagine their marketing doesn't care about that.