Upgraded to XFree86 4.3, Games much slower

[techniq]

After upgrading my Suse 8.1 install to X 4.3, my games are running much slower than before. I am getting 70 fps per second in Q3 when I used to be getting around 120 (I did a comparson of Windows Vs. Linux gaming here (http://www.atcarena.com:8000/forum_atc/viewtopic.php?t=1313) ) I've tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers (its a 4600), but no luck. I do have the driver in my config set to "nvidia"

[redcape]

Your benchmarks show you are running at 1600x1200. Are you sure your monitor can actually refresh at 120 Hz at this resolution? Mine can't. The new version of X might have enabled VSync to prevent the pointless rendering of frames that can't be displayed.

Something else I noticed from your benchmarks is that you are benchmarking different scores for running with Gnome, KDE and no desktop environment. This seems a rather strange thing to do, because all Linux gamers would always run nothing except X to get maximum speed. However, you have a fast CPU, and Quake 3 is a very old game, so it really shouldn't make any difference if you have Gnome running using up 2 percent of your CPU. Quake 3 will be limited by the graphics card, not the CPU. And yet your benchmarks *do* show a difference. I can't explain that.

The obvious answer is to go back to XF86 4.2. NVidia's closed source drivers are always dodgy; perhaps they don't like XF86 4.3.

[techniq]

I was figuring it might be a driver problem with NVidia and X 4.3. I guess I'll just live with the performance cut (makes UT 2003 pretty much unplayable now, especially with any bots).

The reason I benchmarked Linux in 3 situations was to show the difference. If you noticed, I also turned off Norton Anti Virus in Windows, and it made a huge difference.

[redcape]

Does XFree86 4.3 have any features that weren't in 4.2 that you really need? I can't imagine any feature that would outweight a 50 percent drop in performance. You don't have to 'live with it', you can downgrade to 4.2.

XFree86 4.3 was only released last week wasn't it? It is quite possible that the bug is in XFree86 rather than in Nvidia's drivers. It's usually a good idea to wait a few months after a major package is released before you upgrade so that by then other people will have found and fixed any bugs.

Just to be sure: you aren't running Mesa are you? Do
glxgears -info

I don't think you could be because Mesa wouldn't give you even 70 FPS, but you never know.

[Hayl]

this may or may not help you: when I upgraded to X 4.3, my FPS lowered as well. i recompiled the nvidia drivers and the problem went away. if you are using RPMs to install the nvidia drivers, try using the tarballs.

[bwkaz]

Installing X 4.3 may very well have overwritten your nVidia driver's libglx.so file, or the libGL.so file. Or the libGLcore.so file.

Yeah, try reinstalling (with a --force or something) the NVIDIA_GLX package.

[techniq]

I had done it before, but I guess I might had rewritten over them again while I was working on fixing the font issue X 4.3 has (might just be a suse rpm prob).

Anyways, force installing the GLX rpm again worked. Thanks all for helping out.

[MxCl]

SuSE's readme for the XFree86 4.3 rpms states that the NVIDIA drivers need to be reinstalled after installing XFree86 4.3.

I have SuSE 8.1 and installed the new xf86, gears went from 3000 fps to 180 so I realised something was wrong!