nouveau vs nvidia problems

[geion]

Got an GeForce 6150SE nforce 430 on AMD x86_64 and Acer X233H monitor and Fedora 15 gnome. The nouveau driver works fine and i get good results with gtkperf, for the card, @7, the only thing is dragging windows around is choppy enough to drive me nuts at the vertical edges only. And processor load doesn't go further then 20%. When i load nvidia drivers, i got smooth dragging with much more processor load but big chopping scrolling with the mouse wheel only in Firefox 6 and Flash 11 when flash is present on pages. I wish i have saved the xorg.conf from nvidia installation since my only hope is some magical setting in there that would make the chopping disappear with nouveau too. Over all the impression that nouveau drivers are better especially since i don't have to install them, except for this tiny, little thing...

With KDE i got choppy dragging with nvidia drivers too so no hope there. But this show that there is a big chance there is a setting problem.

[DBelton]

the scrolling problem in firefox can be alleviated somewhat if you go into the firefox preferences

and on in the advanced settings, on the general tab, uncheck "use smooth scrolling" and make sure the box to use hardware acceleration is checked.

I too have found the nouveau drivers to be sufficient for everything I have needed. I haven't installed the nvidia drivers on F15 or F16 since nouveau has improved so much. If you do a lot of graphics intensive gaming, nouveau doesn't work as well, but other than that, it seems to be really coming along good.

BTW, I too am seeing a little bit of chopping along the vertical edges when I drag windows using the nouveau driver as well. It's not too bad, and doesn't cause any issues, just looks a little sloppy when dragging a window.

btw, I got the same monitor as you, mine is the x223h.. nice monitor for the price.

[geion]

Yeah i just tried to reinstall and put nvidia drivers but i forgot to upgrade the kernel and it crashed of course... I wanted to see what kind of xorg.conf makes. Do you have one handy? Can you paste it here please?

[DBelton]

I haven't really used an xorg.conf file since F14 when I last ran the nvidia drivers.

I did look around on my drives
Best I could come up with was a really old one that had just the basics for the nvidia dirvers.

This was on a 32 bit system. the modulepath was a little different on 64 bit.

# Xorg configuration created by livna-config-display

Section "Files"
	ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
	ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option	    "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "nvidia"
	Option	    "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
	Option	    "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Edit:

Dont use this xorg.conf file... It is an old one and things have changed a lot since it was used.

For one thing, I believe that it puts snippets of the xorg.conf file in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d folder now instead of adding things to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

[geion]

Just installed the whole ... thing. There is nothing in the xorg.conf except that it says it's nvidia. Couldn't install nvidia driver until i did all the updates. Here is part of the yum log

Oct 01 01:13:36 Installed: nvidia-settings-1.0-11.fc15.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:37 Installed: nvidia-xconfig-1.0-9.fc15.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:37 Installed: libvdpau-0.4.1-4.fc15.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:45 Installed: 1:kmod-nvidia-2.6.40.4-5.fc15.x86_64-280.13-2.fc15.2.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:47 Installed: 1:xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-280.13-1.fc15.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:51 Installed: 1:xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-280.13-1.fc15.x86_64
Oct 01 01:13:52 Installed: 1:kmod-nvidia-280.13-2.fc15.2.x86_64

gtkperf gives me a score of 5 and that while the browser open on the screen. But the difference between 5 and 7 is too small to justify the choppiness... I can move things around so smoothly on the screen... Then i downloaded the 64 bit Flash preview and went to a web site a lot of flash content. After scrolling up and down for minutes, i was thinking the problem was gone, but exactly then it broke a picture in two, vertically... I tried to do a screenshot, but the moment i press the PRTSCN key, it straightens up and the saved image looks ok! But in never does it with the srollbar, just the mouse wheel. There could be a mouse problem, but i swaped mice around, a problem between flash 11 and nvidia driver, i don't know, everything else looks so ... good, i just don't want to give it up and go back to win...

---------- Post added at 01:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 AM ----------

OK it does it with the scrollbar too it's exactly like it forgets to do something or their is some event overlapping or something... by the way, i changed Firefox priority to -6 with system monitor and then works just fine... Just don't wanna do it on permanent basis, or maybe i should and forget the whole thing...

[ozjd]

I found Nouveau gave problems with Chrome on KDE. Some sites wouldn't load always giving the "Aw Snap" screen. Installing nvidia fixed that.

If you had installed the akmod-nvidia instead of the kmod you wouldn't have had the problem with the old kernel but updating is a good idea anyway. I'd still install the akmod so future kernel updates don't cause problems.

With KDE if you are using Desktop Effects try without them. If it improves try disabling them individually. Blur is often a problem so I'd start there.

On one of my computers I need a more detailed xorg.conf for it to work at all. I'll post a copy of it if it would help you when I get up there again. On this laptop only the basic one created by nvidia plus the conf file in xorg.conf.d that David mentioned is required. It has an old 8400GS card.

[geion]

Got it. Thanks for everything. You probably see the little Chrome icon. Works perfectly so far with nvidia drivers, super fast and finally feels that a computer of this power is doing its job, after 3 years of Windows.

[geion]

Yesterday was the day of the release of first beta for flash 11. It installed itself automatically on google chrome for the first time. But it has bugs. One site froze and other duplicates lines.

Considering going back to nouveau and Firefox, if i only could solve the nouveau problem. Essentially at benchmarks it's slightly less performant then nvidia, why the big problem whith dragging windows around with the mouse?

---------- Post added at 03:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:53 PM ----------

I posted an error that appears in syslog here http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=265441

---------- Post added at 04:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:52 PM ----------

Just looked in BIOS. HPET is enabled, SVM and C1E disabled. C1E is not changeable. Why is it there for, i cannot move the focus on it. It depends on other settings?

[ozjd]

I got the update to Flash 11 today but it didn't say it was beta. Seems to work okay, I haven't noticed any problem on either machine. The one with the 64 bit plugin worked fine with several sites including YouTube. I haven't tested the one with the 32 bit plugin (64 bit system) on many sites though. I use nvidia driver, 280.13 at the moment and the 64 bit machine has been updated to a newer kernel today.