Horrible framerate (NVIdia GeForce 7300 LE)

[HaMBoNE79]

I have two computers sitting in front of me right now...one is a brand new Gateway GM5260 and the other is a P3 based computer I built about 6 years ago. The older computer has an NVidia GeForce FX 5500 video card and the new Gateway has an NVidia GeForce 7300LE. Both computers are using the latest NVidia drivers from the Livna repo (also using nearly identical xorg.conf files), but the Gateway is getting horrible frame rates.

Right now the older computer can get a framerate of about 2200fps running glxgears, but the Gateway is only getting around 600fps running glxgears. There are no errors or warnings in the Xorg logs so I have no idea what could be going on.

Do I have a faulty video card or what?

[stevea]

glxgears is not a good benchmark, but something seems wrong. The 5500 was a good card in it's day and may only be 30-40% slower tan the 7300le overall.

I don't want to rain on your parade but personally I've always had heartburn with Dell systems. Their system look OK from the superficial specs but when you look under the hood you'll find they've cut every corner on memory speed and northbridge config, drive specs, system fan noise, chassis weight etc. I once found a Dell system that was speed crippled by on-board jumper settings for memory. Do check all the bios settings and make sure it looks OK. I doubt even Dell would make a system slower than your old P3 system. IMO if you're smart enough to install Linux then you are also sharp enough to go to newegg or tigerdirect or ewiz (and others) and pickup a chassis, mobo, vid-card, memory ,disk & cd and roll a better, cheaper, faster system than Dell. Doh ! I've less experience with Gateway but I expect the same tactics.

Since the systems are so similar why not put your old 5500 card in the Dell and see how glxgears runs ?

[stevea]

I see on the gateway site that their 7300LE only has 64MB of memory! I can't find any commercial card with so little, What is on your 5500 ?

[HaMBoNE79]

stevea, I have come to the conclusion that the 7300LE card is a piece of junk. I had a GeForce 6200 LE card sitting around that I salvaged from another machine so I decided to throw it in the Gateway to see how it ran. After I got it installed, I tweaked the xorg.conf file to handle my two 19" LCDs and was able to get around 2200 fps running at 2560x1024 (24bit color) resolution while using Compiz-Fusion.

Now I am happy again :D