Poor 3D Performance with GeForce 8400M GS [SOLVED]

Message

db_404 · Post by **db_404** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 2:20 am

Recently (think last 2-3 months) I've been getting very poor 3D performance with my 8400M GS, 3D acceleration is working, but so slow as to be practically unusable ~150 FPS on glxgears. Prior to this performance was pretty decent.

Any thoughts as to why this is happening, there have been a number of X and nvidia updates of late, so presumably it's related to those.

Versions -

x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.29
X.Org X Server 1.5.3

glxinfo indicates 3D acceleration is available:

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$ glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
....

Kulfaangaren! · Post by **Kulfaangaren!** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 12:41 pm

It seems you do not use the nvidia driver even though you have installed it.
The top 5 lines of glxinfo should look like this if you were using the correct driver...

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lap25 ~ # glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes 
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.4
...

Notice the vendor string, it should say "NVIDIA Corporation". Also further down in the output spam you should see something like...

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...
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation                                      
OpenGL renderer string: Quadro NVS 160M/PCI/SSE2                              
OpenGL version string: 3.0.0 NVIDIA 180.29
...

The important part is the OpenGL version string which tells you the version of the nVidia driver you are using.
My guess is that you are still using software rendering, not HW accelerated. IMHO the problem can be one of either xorg config not being properly setup OR the correct driver not beeing selected.

Use the command 'eselect opengl list' to show which OpenGL drivers are installed on your system. On my system this shows...

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lap25 ~ # eselect opengl list
Available OpenGL implementations:
  [1]   nvidia *
  [2]   xorg-x11

The asterisk (*) marks which driver is active, in the above case nvidia driver is used. If the correct driver is not used you can easily fix that by using an other version of the eselect command, 'eselect opengl set <#> where <#> is the number infront of the driver in the list. You do need to restart X completely for these changes to take effect so if you are running XDM/GDM/KDM, just restart the machine otherwise just shut down X and start it again.

Make sure the nvidia driver kernel module is loaded with the help of our friend lsmod | grep nvidia.

If the above does not help I would suggest that you try to use the nvidia-xconfig utility (which is installed together with the nvidia driver) to modify your xorg.conf[/] to load and use the nvidia driver correctly.

Hope this helps.

// Fredrik

db_404 · Post by **db_404** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 2:06 am

Thanks, that was it. Not sure how it ended up that way though. Switching to nvidia opengl broke a few things (principally Firefox), but a few compiles later I'm back up and running.

Kulfaangaren! · Post by **Kulfaangaren!** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 1:34 am

Great ! Happy computing !

// Fredrik