Nvidia 177.82 Running Slow

Up until recently SL on Linux was running faster than on Windows. Now I'm lagging terribly. For instance: last night I was in a winter sim. My FPS dropped to 7 and 8 on Mid. I've been averaging around 15 to 20 fps when I used to get 30 or better. I can't think of anything that's changed. I booted into Windows Vista and went back to the same sim and was getting 30 to 50 fps. Any troubleshooting tips?

System: AMD Phenom 9500. 3GB DDR2 RAM. Nvidia 8800GT 512Mb. openSuse 11.0 64bit. Kernel 2.6.25.18-0.2. Using official client, release client, Cool Viewer. Changing clients makes no difference.

Last week I upgraded an older system running suse 11.0 by replacing a 7600GS by a 9800GT and installed driver 177.82

The FPS after upgrade was much less than expected (some twice than before).

Reading your post I think there may be a problem with the 177.82

Figures. Maybe 180.x will be better.

Thanks.

Nope. 180.16 beta stull runs slow. I think it might have something to do with PowerMizer.

Well, I'm wiping Vista off my other hard drive and installing XP Pro. Most games are Windows games anyway.

I use a 9800 GT with the 180.16 driver with a 2.6.28-rc9 kernel and i experienced horrible slowdowns after a while and a lot of texture caching the videocard did. when i set the video meory at preferences to the lowest possible, the slowdowns disappeared. It's only a workaround and not exactly desireable, but at least i can be on SL now without it crawling at 5 fps after a while. Maybe your issues are related.
Merry Xmas ^_^

-Asri

I recently upgraded to kernel 2.6.28, and NVIDIA beta driver 180.17. So far I am having nothing but luck - and have not encountered the keyboard focus loss I so dread.

I am also able to turn all the shaders on and get decent performance, something I have not enjoyed for several versions since.

1 hour and going strong!

Oh, some good news perhaps. I'll try upgrading the kernel first. It would be awesome if that fixed it.

Hadn't thought of turning down the video memory. I'll try that if the kernel doesn't help.

Thanks

it run smoother yess but I have had the same issue with that driver as the windows client . it won't let you mod clothing and textures will go wonky.

Not so many tests as you did, but I'm sorry to join to folks having troubles.
I run Gentoo Linux x86_64 on AMD, with nVidia 8800 GTS, proprietary drivers 177.82 and 2.6.27 kernel.

The CPU load goes frequently up and I had to reduce the video quality to make SL usable (but not good).

I've never had similar problems before.

Regards,
Guru

Same problems here. My screen will freeze up for seconds at a time. Sometimes 0.5-2s, sometimes like 4-5s. It happens even in a relatively empty sim, and dropping graphics options down to minimum seems to have little affect on things (server, network, and texture statistics don't seem to do anything funny when these freeze-ups occur either). When I clear my cache and restart things get better...for a little while. It's INSANE! My client used to run smoothly even when the sim was next to dying.

I'm running Fedora Core 9 with completely up-to-date kernel and NVidia drivers.

----

Second Life 1.22.4 (106127) Dec 16 2008 12:34:49 (Second Life Release Candidate)
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
Memory: 2012 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.27.9-73.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 14:54:03 EST 2008 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 177.82

Since switching to Arch Linux, SL is running very fast. I wonder if the bigger distros have too many services running.

I have also noticed problems with gaming and KDE 4.

It might be worth a try to start removing applications and services you don't need.

I'm only guessing. Never did figure out the exact cause.

I'm running Gentoo Linux and it's logic is very similar to Arch Linux.
And I'm pretty sure about my services... Also, services should not cause such a problem (very well described in the Hewee Zetkin post).

I can add my stupid considerations:
- freezes correspond to such system process (I've a simple GKRellM graph, but I haven't a good way to understand what activity - for example a log);
- because that, the whole system slow strongly (even my amarok music freeze, rarely);
- "naturally", freezes happen when there are animations (camera movements, water and so on).

The KDE 4 hypothesis also is not to be considered: I'm running KDE 3.5.

IMHO, the differences are due to some difference in to /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

It could be very useful if folks NOT having the issue post their configuration file here.


Regards,
Guru

Here same problem (avg fps at ~22., freezes of a quarter a second to several seconds after a few minutes of use).
It came after an upgrade from OpenSuse 11.0 to OpenSuse 11.1 (or around the time of this upgrade... I cannot be sure anymore).
180.08 or 180.18 both have this problem. Could not go back to 177.80 yet.
I have a GeForce 8400GS.

Is kernel 2.6.27 the culprit? (the guy using 2.6.28 seems to be ok)
Do you have this version too, you who also reported the same issue? (not the general slowdown issue)

I confirm that KDE4 is for nothing. I experienced it with IceWM too.
What could I try for ruling Powermizer out?

Here's my config:


2.6.27-ARCH

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 1.0 (buildmeister@builder63) Tue Nov 4 14:07:17 PST 2008

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
HorizSync 30.0 - 110.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 150.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

[mooreted@myhost ~]$

Huh, you'd think Gentoo would haul butt.

Well I*also tried disabling obviously expensive services (like beagle indexation, even pulseaudio, as it can take a lot of CPU*!).

I tried, as suggested to change the video memory size to the minimum.

An explanation involving memory context switching seemed a reasonnable one to me. Everything is fast as long the needed data is cached, but eventually there would be a cache miss, and the need to load data from somewhere else. This is of course unavoidable, but why would it be suddenly so slow, when it used to work fast enough?

Steely: the interesting thing in your xorg.conf is that you pass no option to the video card driver! Should I take that default settings just work?

Yup, the default settings are working fine. No jitter. I'm getting around 50fps right now with settings on high. Not many AVI's in the sim of course.

I did get major lag every few seconds when trying to copy a bunch of files while playing.

Another datapoint: 180.xx requires a 2.6.28 kernel to work smoothly.

Are you still in troubles?
Upgrading to SecondLife-i686-1.22.5.107013 (the RC version) resolved almost all problems for me (no significant differences in xorg.conf).
Sometimes (but very rarely) I encounter the discussed problem, for a short time.

Combining this to the perfect behaviour of the video card in all others applications, make me think that it is a client issue.

Regards,
Guru Urqhart

katheryne@Prue:~$ uname -r
2.6.27-11-generic
katheryne@Prue:~$

Which distro are you using? I have the 'proposed' repos enabled, and 2.6.28 hasn't made it our way yet...

Gentoo. I custom-compiled my kernel (have always since Slackware) and it's up to 2.6.28.2 running (although .4 just landed).

I just upgraded to 2.6.29-rc5, and all those freezes who had bugged me for 2 months no matter what I tried just disappeared.
It seems that this issue is really specific to 2.6.27!