I Know Vaugue Sucks But I Need Help Here

Hi all. I've been using an ATI 9550 for a while now with no major hangups. I just a couple of days ago, on recommendation from several Linux friends, and due to some slowness in SL, switched to a new nVidia 7600GS 256MB card.

Now for some reason (even after a complete re-install of Ubuntu feisty) SL will start and run for about a whole 30 seconds or less and crash out.

I've even tried disabling ALL OpenGL, and still it crashes out.

Any other GL applications I run like GL screensavers, Open Arena, etc. Run super smooth and good-lookin', without a hitch.

Does anyone have any ideas or have a similar card with similar experiences they've found a fix for? I hate to go back to my old card when this one performs so fantastic. For the short 30 seconds or so I get out of SL it is GORGEOUS!!! and SMOOTH with everything maxed even when I tried it once.

Oh and in closing notes: I also got some weird "flashing" while in SL... the screen would 'blip' and I got vertical bar 'blips' every so often.

Thanks in advance, let me know if there is anything I can add for further help.

-Hap.

stupid question but need to ask, you have the nvidia drivers off their website correct?

Actually no it's not a stupid question. I'm using Ubuntu, and what I WAS using was their "unrestricted driver" which was an actual nvidia driver. Whenever I tried to use the latest greatest from nvidias website, I ended up with nothing but trouble..

ANYWAY, I have gone back to my good old tried and true ATI Radeon 9600 for testing purposes and here are my results...

I am using the standard fglrx driver which gives you the fglrxinfo report of:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 XT
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6334 (8.34.

Now... I can play Open Arena all day long no problems... all GL savers work great... and SL will open and run just fantastic and smooth as butter UNTIL....

about 2 min or so go by then all of a sudden things start getting REALLY choppy, my card starts getting hot (I've installed a thermometer on it. It doesn't get so hot it should mess up or anything, but hotter than even my most intense video games like Unreal tournament, DOOM III, etc. by about 4 degrees give or take)

It's consistent no matter what time of day, or what kind of lag shows on the network. I've got high speed broadband cable so no problems there. I just don't know.

Current configuration:
Ubuntu Feisty 7.04
ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128MB
2GB DDR RAM
AMD Athlon 3000+ 64 2GHz (system is 32 bit install of OS+software)
Second Life 1.17.0(12) (I also tried the latest version with same result)

Just as a side note: I have an alternate login session I created that I can login with xgl and beryl running and my system runs flawlessly with eveything full bore as well. So I am seriously scratching my head here.

THANK YOU for any suggestions you might have.

-Hap

Mm, this is just a thought; have you attempted to install the restricted drivers? I think Feisty ships them by default but I don't recall (I've been LFSing for a while now, only running releases of Debian for the "Yeah, I've tried it" value)... There are full nvidia drivers available for Ubuntu, though, and unless I misunderstood, I think your best plan of action at this point is to install those drivers, not from NVidia.com but rather the debian package available (sudo aptitude install nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-glx) and restart X, then try again.

Um, I hope this helps.

Running a nvidia 7950 board and noticed that the newest drivers brought in a massive performance drop. I got back to 100.14.09....works much better. Maybe you should try out this older ones....

From an ATi X1300 to a 7600/256. Had a lot of issues with completely purging all traces of the fglrx driver, then the NV driver which I tried just to get something up (silly me - VESA is you friend, not the others for 'getting something up'). But finally I got it all working very smoothly on the latest Nvidia-supplied driver.

Only caveat is I had to downgrade to Kernel 2.6.18.4 as the latest Debian/testing kernel (2.6.21.2) was screwing up both my fglrx driver (no xv - in the middle of a holiday Sci-Fi marathon) and also the Nvidia driver (no nuffink).

Since then, VERY smooth, though I haven't been on-grid that much - a few 5 minute stretches to gawp at the tremendous FPS ;-D. Amazing what a decent upper-mid-range video card can do for a Sempron 2400 system!

I am using the settings for my ATI card still:

export LL_GL_BLACKLIST=l

as well as:

export LL_BAD_ESD=x
export LL_BAD_OSS=x

I need to play around with the blacklist all over again and it might also be something to play with re your own problems.

Well, I am using the normal "restricted Drivers" that come with feisty as we speak.

I have found at this point however that no matter what settings I use, my processor ends up getting pegged out at 100 percent after 2 minutes or less, so I am going to go and try once more to pickup a newATi card just to see if it helps. All it does is fluctuate between hogging up between 74 and 100 percent of the CPU - back and forth.. sucks!

I'm figuring it runs smooth at the first few minutes until SL is finished loading up inventory and everything around me... even the stuff I don't notice until finally my small card I'm using right now is pegged out and has to relenquish control over to the OS for process handling that it can't take.

Especially this new version I've been forced to swallow... holy crap! It didn't take 30 seconds to bog down. lol

Take care and thanks for the info. Tonight or tomorrow I will pick up a new card and try out some of the settings you guys posted and see where I end up.

I am going to stick with ATI though. After 3 ATI cards and no glitches or frequesnt crashes, and 3 nvidia cards and nothing but artifacts and frequent crashes... I'm going to lean towards some sort of system compatibility issue and stick w/ ATI.

c-me! I'll keep you posted and thanks a mint!

-Hap

As far as I know this is rather normal with SL. As there are some calculations for each frame that either can't be or just aren't computed on the GPU, SL will take all it can from the CPU to push your FPS some up. However it seems to detect when CPU cycles are needed by other applications, so it won't block them.

yes, full CPU usage by SL is normal - SL takes every spare cycle for itself, however is fairly generous in giving back cycles to anything else that needs it.