nvidia-drivers 180.06+ WOW!

[rapsure]

Well I'm trying out the new nvidia driver 180.06 and it does have a very large performance increase for geforce 8000 and newer Graphics cards. So normally Gentoo does not add a nvidia beta driver to portage, but with the large performance increases I am contemplating on adding a bug to have it added. However I'm not going to add a zero day bug and I would like to get others experience from this new driver. Other really cool things with this new driver is the inclusion of pure video acceleration.

To install the driver

Code: Select all

cd /usr/portage/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers
cp nvidia-drivers-177.80.ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild digest

This will only last until portage is synced, but if you use portage-2.2_rcX then you won't have to worry about the driver from being uninstalled.

That will allow the new nvidia driver to be installed. For me I'm experiencing a 2.75 * speed improvement and I've measured it against the Windows driver and cpu usage is on par for flash videos. Other improvements include aliased text in gnome terminal only using about 2 - 4% cpu during compiling on an AMD 64 4200+ CPU.

To install the new nvidia-settings that goes with this release do:

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cd /usr/portage/media-video/nvidia-settings
cp nvidia-settings-177.80.ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild .digest

The new nvidia-settings allows some new parameters to be set with the driver regarding pixmap cache size.

I've tried to compile the demo for the purevideo enhanced mplayer and ffmpeg and haven't got them to compile. It errors out with libx264.

[koschi]

Same here for KDE4's plasma. A huge speedup. Plasma is running fine now.

System:
Compal IFL90 Laptop
Core2Duo T7300 @ 2GHz
GeForce 8600M GT

[kernelOfTruth]

Hi,

anyone tried out the new nvidia-drivers ?

Release Highlights:

* Added support for CUDA 2.1.
* Added initial support for PureVideo-like features on Linux via the new VDPAU API (see the vdpau.h header file installed with the driver).
* Added new workstation performance optimizations.
* Enabled the X Render "GlyphCache" by default.
* Disabled shared memory X pixmaps by default; see the “AllowSHMPixmaps" option.
* Fixed a regression that could result in window decoration corruption when running Compiz using Geforce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
* Improved X pixmap placement on GeForce 8 series and later GPUs.
* Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels.
* Improved stability on some GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs.

The 180.06 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86 is available for download via HTTP .
The 180.06 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86-64 is available for download via HTTP

Please note: This NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release supports GeForce 6xxx and newer NVIDIA GPUs, GeForce4 and older GPUs are supported through the 96.43.xx and 71.86.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers. GeForce FX GPUs are supported through the 173.14.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers.

Please also note: If you encounter any problems with the 180.06 NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release, please start a new thread and include a detailed description of the problem, reproduction steps and generate/attach an nvidia-bug-report.log file (please see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46678 for details).

link to the official announcement: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123072

link to the article at phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... dpau&num=1

that's a really nice move

[jcat]

Works nice here to, definite performance increase



Cheers,
jcat

[Schwinni]

If one of you uses Gnome:
Is the "delay bug" - where you have to set "GdmXserverTimeout=30" in /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf - fixed also?

[Schwinni]

I tried. It isn't fixed.

BTW, when using nvidia-drivers-180.06 you can also use nvidia-settings-180.00.

[AaronPPC]

HUGE performance increase with Gnome/Compiz-Fusion.

[kernelOfTruth]

*subscribes*

anyone tried it with 2.6.28-rc* based kernels ? are they supported now ?

I'll most probably try them tomorrow and tell you guys how it guys with the 7600GT and 8400M GS

if they fix most of the problems known with nvidia-drivers they definitely need to get added to the portage-tree

[jcat]

If one of you uses Gnome:
Is the "delay bug" - where you have to set "GdmXserverTimeout=30" in /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf - fixed also?

What bug is this?


BTW I have noticed some graphics corruption with this beta, little patches of multi-coloured pixels, hopefully the next release will fix that and leave the performance gains



Cheers,
jcat

[ppurka]

If one of you uses Gnome:
Is the "delay bug" - where you have to set "GdmXserverTimeout=30" in /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf - fixed also?

What bug is this?

I think this refers to the bug that restarting the X server takes more than 30s. And it is not confined to the use of gdm only, happens here with entrance too.

[asturm]

This might extend the life of my 7900 GTO. Running 180.06 now with 2.6.28-rc4-git5.

EDIT: I'm having font rendering problems.

[Cr0t]

Just to make this clear... and fix all the spelling issues

Code: Select all

su -
cd /usr/portage/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers/
cp nvidia-drivers-177.80.ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild digest
cd ../../media-video/nvidia-settings/
cp nvidia-settings-177.80.ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild digest

[Stupendoussteve]

Just to make this clear... and fix all the spelling issues

Code: Select all

su -
cd /usr/portage/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers/
cp nvidia-drivers-177.80.ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-drivers-180.06.ebuild digest
cd ../../media-video/nvidia-settings/
cp nvidia-settings-177.80.ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild
ebuild nvidia-settings-180.00.ebuild digest

Once your sync your tree and update world this will be removed, no? Unless you mask previous versions or use a local overlay.

[bunder]

yes. home-made/out-of-tree ebuilds should go into /usr/local/portage/group-name/package/, or wherever your PORTDIR_OVERLAY is configured to.

cheers

[kernelOfTruth]

This might extend the life of my 7900 GTO. Running 180.06 now with 2.6.28-rc4-git5.

EDIT: I'm having font rendering problems.

disabling the GlyphCache should fix it:

nvidia-settings -a GlyphCache=0

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123084

[APolozov]

waiting ebuild for mplayer-vdpau or new mplayer

[weaksauce]

This is really sweet news, actually. Is there a particular repository you used to install the beta driver or did you just install it manually?

[asturm]

The nvidia-drivers-177.80 ebuild works fine with 180.06

[APolozov]

This is really sweet news, actually. Is there a particular repository you used to install the beta driver or did you just install it manually?

Manually

[weaksauce]

Indeed, that didn't occur to me to try this time for some reason. I'm about to add those patches in to mplayer. Anyone have any results to report so far?

[Moonboots]

Indeed, that didn't occur to me to try this time for some reason. I'm about to add those patches in to mplayer. Anyone have any results to report so far?

I ran the script file included with the patches, but it borked out complaining about x264, while building mplayer. My current mplayer/x264 set up is from
the berkano overlay.

[weaksauce]

Same problem here. However, I'm just using x264 from ~x86.

[APolozov]

Indeed, that didn't occur to me to try this time for some reason. I'm about to add those patches in to mplayer. Anyone have any results to report so far?

All discuss http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123095

[FallenWizard]

I am using the new driver already and all that I can say: AWESOME!

The driver is a lot faster now and they finally fixed the plasma corruption bug in KDE4.

[platojones]

WOW is right. They fixed a lot in this driver. Google Earth doesn't crash in Compiz-Fusion anymore! KDE 4.1.3 is much more stable and feels as fast as KDE 3.5. I used to have a lot of glitches with Plasma...it seems to work flawlessly now. It seems a lot of the bad performance I was attributing to KDE 4.1 was actually caused by the Nvidia driver. This is a massive improvement in performance and stability. I too just renamed the previous ebuild, put it in my local portage directory and built it without a problem. This is one of the bigger improvements I've ever noticed in the Linux Nvidia driver.