Riva TNT 16 meg and Slack 9.1, WHAT DRIVER?

[zPacKRat]

I have a clean install of Slackware 9.1 on a Abit BE6 with a celeron 950 and an original Creative Labs Riva TNT card with 16 megs of ram. After checking glxgears and getting about 120 fps I decided to install the Nvidia drivers and to my dismay I am only getting about 50-55 fps now. I need some ideas on why my frame rate drops with the Nvidia drivers. Agpgart is loading so I know that is not the issue.

[JamminJoeyB]

You wouldn't happen to have a pci version of this card sitting around you'd like to send my way would you? I got an old p150 that could use a bit more muscle in the vid department.

Not sure why the nvidia drivers would kill your frame rates.

Did you edit your XF86config to use nvidia?

I'm pretty sure the unified driver nvidia uses should work well. Check the read me and see if there is something you need to do. That readme is a killer resource.

[zPacKRat]

nope, no pci cards around, and yes I edited my X86Config file to use the Nvidia drivers, I even get the nice Nvidia logo when I launch X.

[JamminJoeyB]

Did you happen to see this in the read me? Maybe this could get your fps up.

app-h) APPENDIX H: TNT SPECIFIC ISSUES
__________________________________________________ ________________________

Most issues pertaining to SGRAM/SDRAM TNT cards should be resolved.
There is the rare chance, however, that your video card has the wrong
BIOS installed, and that this driver will continue to fail for you.

If this driver fails for you, do the following:

o watch your monitor as the system boots. The very first, brief screen
will identify the type of video memory your card has. This will be
either SGRAM or SDRAM.

o edit the file "os-registry.c" from the kernel module sources. Look
for the variable "NVreg_VideoMemoryTypeOverride". Set the value of
the variable to the type of memory you have (numerically, see the
line just above it).

o since we do not normally use this variable, change the "#if 0" that is
about 10 lines above the variable to "#if 1".

o rebuild and reinstall the new driver ("make")

[bwkaz]

If you're using the new 5328 nVidia drivers, then sometimes this is caused (especially on newer Via motherboards) by a problem with the driver passing NULL pointers out to kernel functions that are expecting to never receive NULL pointers.

Check the output of dmesg to see whether it has any "unable to handle kernel paging request" or "unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference" messages in it. If it does, then head over to www.minion.de, grab the patch for 5328, run bunzip2 on it, and open it up in an editor. Delete everything up to the line that reads:

diff -ruN NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-5328/os-interface.c NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-5328-2.6/os-interface.c Keep that line and the two after it, then delete anything up to the line that reads:

@@ -618,12 +623,28 @@ Keep that line and everything up to the next one that starts with @@. Delete that one and everything after it.

Save and exit, then run the nVidia installer with the --extract-only option. Then cd into the newly created directory. Then cd usr/src/nv and patch -p1 -i /path/to/modified/patchfile. After this patches os-interface.c, you can cd ../../.. and run ./nvidia-installer to install the fixed drivers.

DON'T do this if you aren't getting "unable to handle" messages in the output of dmesg, though!

[sharth]

Instead of using the most recent driver, try the one released previous to it. From the very little that I've heard, there are some problems with it.

[JamminJoeyB]

Any of these suggestions fix the problem?

[zPacKRat]

Fixed,
uninsitalled latest and installed 4496 drivers on sharths recomendation and am now getting 410 fps in glxgears.