[a7n8x] AGP/OpenGL DISTRESS HELP!

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

After having spent countless hours, reading hundreds of forum posts, and general suffering from some unknown hell, i am here... hoping i can get some help.

The Setting:
asus a7n8x-dx
xp-2400+
maxtor 94091U8
geforce mx 440 ( 8x AGP )
2x Samsung DDR400 CL3 ( Asus Tested )

The Problems:
The central problem is OpenGL rendering frame rates... i.e. when gaming there are nasty spikes. I have attempted the following things w/ results mentioned:

1) Audio:

First i thought it was the PCI audio card i had, a Hercules Muse XL ( crap ). So i proceeded to move to i810_audio using the kernel .o -- this works great, but didnt do a damn thing for my frame rates.

2) DMA:

Ok, so then i realized that my hdparm -t /dev/hda scores were total crap ( on the order of 4MB/s ), so proceeded to fondle IDE Chipset support with immediate ( although partial ) success acheiving scores ~30MB/s... but this still didnt do a damn thing for my frame rates.

3) Ok it must be the kernel....

I said that about 14 kernels and 3 days ago. I have tried:
linux-2.4.20-ck4
linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r1
linux-2.4.21-pre4-aa3
linux-2.4.21-pre4-ac7
linux-2.4.21-pre5-ac1
linux-2.4.21-pre5-ac2
linux-2.5.64
linux-2.5.64-mm1
linux-2.5.64-mm2

Plus a few others that I got very pissed off w/ and deleted along the way. Those are the kernels that i have managed to get to boot ( actually w/ the expection of mm2 which does an Ooops because of devfs, almost certainly because i forced it to mount at boot ), they have also had everything working ( except the 2.5 kernels, which i just starting playing w/ a few hours ago )... everything being.... sound, nvagp, nvnet, dma, etc etc... everything seems very happy... except my opengl frame rates...

EVERY SINGLE KERNEL I USED GAVE ME SCORES ~1700FPS!! :/

4) WTF It must be the drivers...

Well, convinced that the problem wasnt related much to the kernel ... i started playing w/ the nvidia drivers, using different version, and FW/SBA. The conclusion is simple.....

I am stuck -- i have tried every reasonable kernel... configured as responsibly or aggresively for each one... i have tried every other system aspect that could be affecting the problem... also to no avail.... The scores for the driver test where ~1700 regardless of the settings...

any help would be greatly appreciated...

could it be the "nvnet.o" ? ... what is recommended for the 3c920?

has someone had more promising results? What kernel? What modules/devices/patches? Are there any known issues here that I have miraculously missed?

thanks in advance to anyone who can help... and thanks again to rommel for already trying to help me out

-d
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handsomepete · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 4:27 pm Post subject:

Just out of curiousity, are you using the onboard video or a separate gf4mx card?
Is your first display set to AGP in the bios? Do you have PCI VGA palette snoop turned on (if so, disable)? Do you have video bios shadow enabled (if so, disable)?
Do you get solid (but slow) frame rates using the regular "nv" driver?
Are you running anything like seti@home that can cause CPU usage spikes in the background?
Have you tried a light window manager for comparison like fluxbox/blackbox/whatever?

Hope at least one of these questions helps in a solution.

Edit: Also, if you're running an agp card and actually running it at agp 8x, knock that sucker down to 4x at least. Who knows if agpgart or even nvidia's agp driver is ready for 8x primetime yet (and obviously, whoever *does* know will jump in and correct me here

)

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

Oh man,

I have actually fondled all the settings you suggest... and I happen to use fluxbox exclusively ( ok ok a little waimea every now and then )....
I am using an AGP-Slot card , and have the BIOS configured properly w/ that in mind.

As far as the AGP goes, i understand that AGPGART simply does not support 8x.
Nvidia 3123 certainly doesnt, but 4194 does ( for me at least -- even quite stable ).

A general update is:

I have managed to fix the actual QUALITY of my fps, that is glxgears give about 2200-2800 depending on my settings/kernel/etc...

THE PROBLEM IS AS FOLLOWS:
Any OpenGL rendering like quake3 gets nice fast frame rates, but as soon as any sound is played there is a massive momentary drop in FPS!!

I am using 2.4.21-pre4-aa3 w/ the built in i810_audio driver atm, but it has been the same for every kernel i mentioned above... Still havent gotten 2.5.* to work too well, but i will battle on later today.

edit: glxgears now gives me ~3200fps w/ aa3, but i am still having major problems w/ frame loss because of sound... moving to ALSA
edit2: omholy the grammar and typos
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decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

UPDATE:

Since the last post i have stuck w/ the pre4-aa3 kernel, and i have tried the following things:

1) Alsa sound.... yay.... made no difference at all... infact quake3 still lags out even though it cant touch the sound driver....

At least now i know it is not the sound for sure.... sooooo

2) I downgraded X from 4.3.0 to 4.2.1 in the hope that THAT was the problem....
again no positive result....

The Plan:
I am rebuilding the kernel ( again ) to use the SMP ( who knows, it might work ), and removing any sort of non-vital features. If this doesnt produce a beneficial result... well then about all i can think to do is downgrade gcc back to 3.2 ( or even the linus recommend 2.95.3[?] ) and recompile....
If that doesnt work .... then i am going to rebuild the whole system as conservatively as possible in an attempt to isolate this problem...

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
>;/design.inspire.create.progress

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

I changed the title... i am at a total loss...

Summary:

I have done exactly as i mentioned i would... and have ended up rebuilding THE WHOLE SYSTEM!?!?!?!

AND THE FRAME RATES ARE STILL LAGGY WTF IS WRONG????

glxgears: ~3400fps .... now... but that makes no difference w/ the huge spikes i get...

simply put its as if while doing anything particularly intense ( e.g. running quake ) the kernel struggles to handle hardware interrupts ( ?!?! ), so i am thinking APIC... right? Well maybe... but no... Every possible combination of every possible APIC related settings ( BIOS and Kernel ) produces no result.

I thought maybe the GFX card was having problems, so i did some tests... had a look at the hardware ... it doesnt even get warm when its pulling along in glxgears for a few minutes....

Maybe it is IRQ's ? I wish it were that easy... every device that is used has a seperate IRQ, the rest are disabled in BIOS. ( Yet i still get the evil "spurious interrupt .... IRQ 7". )

I am to the point of wanting to break this thing, but i cant bring myself to do it

If anyone knows anything about any of the problems i have mentioned... tia
:cry:

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
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taskara · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 12:42 pm Post subject:

hmm strange.. changed your ram ?

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decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

New hardware, not more then a weak old, 2 burn-ed cl3 ddr400 ( running @ 200~!!!~@!~@$#@!$ )... i would like to think they arent the problem...
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taskara · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 9:16 pm Post subject:

sure... well I have an asus a7n8x deluxe with 2X512mb corsair pc3500 ram, ti4200 and I have no problems.

and I built my system 2 days after 1.4_rc3 was released...

using latest gentoo-sources

running my 2400+ cpu at 2700+ (166fsb)
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decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

!>_<! !>_<! !>_<!

hehe, what version of glibc ? what version of gcc? I just did a re-installation from scratch, and i am begining to tend to agree w/ you ( no matter how much i dont like it! ). I was going to run memtest86 last night but ended up passing out after rebuilding the system ( stage3 -> fluxbox in under 2hrs ). I suspect that it could be the HD as well, so if memtest comes back clean i am going to install on the other HD.

Many more questions:
What are your BIOS settings ( can you give me APIC, as well as all the CPU/MEM/AGP settings )? I had been messing around ( OCing ), and i may have screwed something in there, so i am curious how aggressively people have had success.

Do you have the following things in your kernel?
MTTR
SMP
APIC/IO-APIC
Preempt
Low Latency
ACPI
APM

What are your glxgears scores?

What have you tested your GL performance in? I dont notice any problems until i try gaming...

Thanks for posting, anything you can let me know would be a great help ( if only for my morale ).

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
>;/design.inspire.create.progress

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

made a little journal of my experience last night

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=40563

comments welcome ;p

-d
_________________
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sloppy focus owns you
>;/design.inspire.create.progress

taskara · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 3:34 am Post subject:

I'll check tonight when I get home, and let you know! feel free to post any other questions you want an answer to.
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squareroot · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 5:16 am Post subject: delete duplicated post

This copy left while editing

squareroot · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 5:20 am Post subject: kernels for NForce2

Decker-in-Flux 2.4.21-pre4-aa3 fixed many problems for me, but not all.
There are still more bug fixes for the NForce2 IDE drivers. Some interact with things that seem unrelated, and cause slowdowns. I am running 2.4.21-pre5-ac2 and feel it is pretty solid.

The only thing I can't tell you much about is game performance. I installed one or two to check some things and found I had no idea how to play.

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

update:

Ran memtest86 for an hour... not a single error, so i overclocked the ram, and still no errors!

squareroot:

I have noticed some very... buggy behaviour w/ respect to the chipset,
but what i DO know is that i was not having this problem a little while ago ( hence my insistence on battling w/ it ).

I too was using the ac-sources, but problems w/ the swap drive barfing, convince me that they are unless better then the aa-sources w/ respect to their timestamp.

taskara:

where are you... come back

General:

Two new thoughts regarding the problem:

1) maybe it is the stupid nvnet port... I would be using the 3c920 but there is a problem with that:
the 3c59x module loads cleanly, but i CANNOT manage to get it to recieve any packets ( i.e. i can SEND packets... confirmed by 'ifconfig' TX packets, as well as seeing the lights flash on my switch... but the interface does not ever recieve packets... ).
The 3com is enabled in the BIOS, and plugged in ;p
[ throughout this whole trial i have been trying to get that bastard to work too ]
There are a couple of notes regarding this...
first is that 3c59x does not load mii, which was under the impression was the library it uses...
second is when loading 3c59x w/ debug=7 i get a coupious listing of the vortex_spin_lock ( or some other sort of semaphore-synonym ) failing, and returing e000.!!! ???
Also tried a variety of kernel configs regarding this problem... suggestions very welcome.

2) Maybe i have damaged the video card in some way? It seems possible... thought damned if i know how i managed it. Any convenient way to directly test that ( ala memtest86 ) ?
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taskara · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 11:35 am Post subject:

hey.. I'm back.. finally home (10:35pm)

I'll do the tests now and post results
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taskara · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 11:52 am Post subject:

hmmm... since installing from rc3, I've had some issues that I've now noticed.

I can't start X with the nvidia drivers - it freezes and throws gobbledy-gook up on the screen.

that's with xfree 4.3 - and none of the drivers seem to work.

my network seems to be dropping out rarely and randomly. Like all traffic will stop. I'm using nvnet. I do have a driver for the 3com somewhere.

I think I will have to rebuild it.. you may have found some problem somewhere!

try a diff nic - like a realtek 8139 or something simple. and remove the nvnet module.. see if that makes a difference.

anyway I'm going overseas next friday.. not sure if I'll have time to rebuild b4 then..

good luck!
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decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

oh well... i have concluded pretty much that short of a BIOS problem ( god forbid ... ) it must be software... so i am doing a bootstrap... we will see how it goes...

tomorrow

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
>;/design.inspire.create.progress

taskara · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 9:05 pm Post subject:

I agree... my old install (with a jan 20th release) worked perfectly..

maybe it's xfree 4.3 ?
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decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

Its definitly not X4.3.0... well maybe it is , but downgrading to 4.2.1 didnt help... i think it is gcc3.2.2

more later

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
>;/design.inspire.create.progress

squareroot · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 11:18 pm Post subject: BIOS problem?

Don't rule the BIOS out. I've been through several flashes.
Before you take any drastic action go through the settings again.

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

decker in flux · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 60 Location: in flux

UPDATE:

Rebuilding the system didnt do crap. Still laggy as a bastard.

Was poking around and found under 'cat /proc/pci' aka lspci -vv that the "Latency" of my gfx card is 248 ( 1250ns, 250ns ). The 3com network card, and infact everyother device has a lower latency ?!?!?

begs

-d
_________________
>;/
sloppy focus owns you
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taskara · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 12:02 pm Post subject:

hmm I have no idea.

did you get the nvidia driver working with xfree 4.3 ?

have you tried a different nic ?
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azote · Guru Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 415

I just fixed mine!!!

try botting with

taskara · Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2003 1:47 am Post subject:

someone mentioned that there are game-sources or something, and they have a kernel driver for the nforce2

tho I have always used the gentoo-sources without any issues.
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