[SOLVED] Jerky 3D performance with GeForce 5200

[barbolani]

Hi everybody

I've two identical machines with on board GeForce 5200 cards. Both of them were running 8.04 perfectly. I tried to upgrade one of them to 8.10. The upgrade did not worked very well as it was clear that the graphics were performing very poorly. The screen flickered each time I pressed a key and all 3D software was not accelerated.

I tried to fix that without documenting myself and got to a state were KDE was working with special effects enabled and decent speed. Still, no 3D performance.

I assumed that, after 6 years of painless Ubuntu upgrades, I finally managed to get myself in trouble and decided that it was time for a fresh install. After all, I have a separate partition for /home so no data was going to be lost anyway.

Much to my surprise, the performance after a fresh install was the same as after the upgrade. Now I have finally managed to bring the system to a stable state (thanks to the envyng utility!!!) with the nvidia-173 package. But the 8.04 system that sits besides this one still has better 3D performance. In particular, in the bzflag game there is a perceivable stop each 2-3 seconds of play, while the 8.04 machine runs it smoothly (bzflag settings are exactly the same in both)

So 3D is accelerated, but not quite. I've really no idea of where to look for. xorg.conf is also the same on both machines. What I'm missing?

[lmilano]

Re: Jerky 3D performance with GeForce 5200

Well, you are lucky to have an NVIDIA card up and running. See the release announcement:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

Many people including myself can't even use KDE4 with an NVIDIA card, for us it's probably better to stick with 8.04 until this issue is resolved (and, next time, to buy a graphics card that is supported by open source drivers, assuming there is such a thing, I haven't looked into this yet)

[barbolani]

[SOLVED] Jerky 3D performance with GeForce 5200

I finally restored performance on my system on par with 8.04. If you notice 3D game performance differences with 8.04, try to disable the desktop effects before launching the game.

What's ironic is that this does not happen in 8.04, that is, I don't have to disable desktop effects. On the other hand, desktop effects are much much more stable in 8.10. At least for me.

To summarize, if you've a GeForce 5200 and want to restore sanity to your system after an upgrade or fresh install what you need to do is:

- Uninstall all Nvidia related packages.
- Install nvidia-glx-173 packages

I still see the occasional garbage content in freshly opened windows visible just the moment before they are painted, but otherwise my system is rock solid now.

Still think that next time I'll read the release notes carefully, as I did not mind to wait for this (and the rest of the issues) to be fixed before upgrading.

[lmilano]

Re: [SOLVED] Jerky 3D performance with GeForce 5200

Same goes for nvidia-glx-96 (the driver for my card). NVIDIA released a beta driver, available in the proposed updates repo (perhaps it was moved to the regular updates, not sure). It's getting there.

I think, the golden rule for painless upgrades is really to wait a month after a release :-) I ownder if they update the upgrade tool when new software becomes available, though (like, with the NVIDIA drivers, will they still switch users to nv when NVIDIA releases final stable versions of the drivers for the new xorg?

[Snowhog]

Re: [SOLVED] Jerky 3D performance with GeForce 5200

HOWTO: Install and use the Envy script installer for video drivers