NVIDIA GeForce FX5200

When it comes to NVIDIA and Linux all the talk recently has been about the Nouveau 3D open-source driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. While things are progressing very well for this FreeDesktop project and it should get especially interesting later in the year, right now the open-source NVIDIA driver is not at the stage to support Beryl/Compiz as they are still working on the core 3D functionality. However, the official NVIDIA binary drivers already support the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension. This support was added in the NVIDIA 1.0-9XXX series.

Our first Beryl test was done with a PCI based GeForce FX5200 graphics card with 128MB of video memory (running @ 1280x1024). Other system components included dual Xeon LV "Sossaman" dual-core processors and 1GB of ECC Registered DDR2 system memory. With this hardware the FX5200 would idle with Beryl at around 70 FPS. However, once we started glamorizing the desktop with various effects the frame-rate had quickly dropped. While a bit better than the Radeon 9200, the frame-rate during desktop activity was generally between 4 and 10 FPS.