[WBEL-users] Slow X w/ nVidia Geforce2 MX 400 ???

[James Knowles]

I switched both hardware and OS when I went to the workstation that I'm 
using right now.

HW details:
* new mobo (MSI K7N2 Delta), Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM
* nVidia Geforce2 MX 400 video card
* other HW moved from old machine.

Unfortunately the new mobo's AGP slot won't take the slightly older 
1x/2x AGP card I was using (Matrox G450); I didn't realize that until I 
nearly had the whole thing assembled, so I rand down to the store again. 
This nVidia card was the least expensive one the store had in stock that 
would go into the 4x/8x AGP slot (about $30).

OS details: Wiped disks clean (had FC2) and installed a fresh WBEL 
Respin 1; all updates applied.

What I'm seeing is X performance that is, quite frankly, sucky. WBEL 
installed without a problem or complaint. It detected the video card 
fine. The slowness generally doesn't interfere with ordinary activities 
such as web browsing, using OpenOffice, doing ordinary development work, 
etc. The GIMP can be sluggish doing updates on large (3600x4500) images.

When I run VMWare, I see a distinct performance drop compared to the 
previous Matrox G450, as well as bursts of near 100% of CPU cycles 
consumed by X (according to top). It's annoying but doesn't stop me from 
doing my Win32 development work, accounting, &c.

Over the weekend I downloaded Freeciv 1.14.1, compiled, and ran -- but 
holy smokes, each action has a 1-3 second delay, and when the screen 
refreshes &c. top shows X burning up almost 100% CPU time. While this is 
completely trivial, and I could have done something more productive for 
those 3 hours, this appears to be an exaggerated case of X seriously 
dragging its behind.

I'm *assuming* that this is a X driver problem (but I know what happens 
when I ass*u*me things), but I'm not turning up good information from 
Google. bugzilla.redhat.com has only one [irrelevant] closed for RHEL 3 
listed under "nvidia" and "geforce".

Anyhow, I'm not sure where to look at this point.

-- 
One-Day Introductory Course to Medieval Longsword
31 July 2004
http://www.thearma.org/events/utah_ntp10.htm