I am using Linux for quite some time and my laptop has Nvidia video card.
All was working fine for some time, but approximately a year ago I started experiencing really weird video behavior when using NVidia driver and all was just fine with nouveau driver.
I tried to resolve my issue and posted a thread in http://forums.nvidia.com/ but I did not get any help, just some other guy was experiencing the same problem.
Then I tried the next logical thing, contact nvidia support directly.
I described my problem with explanation how to reproduce, but unfortunatelly they told me that were unable to reproduce and closed the tickets.
Some time after that I did really deep research about this issue and found other users experiencing the same behavior and I got some more additinal information about the case.
I opened another ticket with their support and it looks like the same guy tried to support me, but this time he really really made me mad with his answers.
here is the complete history
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ticket opened on 05/13/2011 05:19 AM
Hello,
I have a thinkpad R61 with Quadro NVS 140M.
OS: Fedora 14
Kernel: 2.6.35.13-91.fc14.i686
NV Driver: 270.41.06
I am experiencing the following behavior:
After I install the nvidia driver I have really bad experience while switching between the apps. The worst speed comes when I try to switch back from some other app to Firefox with site open.
It draws the toolbar, menus, address bar and then sometimes it takes 2 secs to display the page pane.
The things are getting really ugly if I start Open Office Calc (spreadsheets), OpenOffice Draw and try to work with them. Even marking an area with the mouse in OpenOffice Draw is very slow.
The speed slows down with time and finally can drive you crazy.
This effect is temporarily cured if I "flush" Pixmap Cache with the following commands:
nvidia-settings -a PixmapCache=0
nvidia-settings -a PixmapCache=1
I dont have any of the above symptoms if I use nouveau, however I have other problems with this driver :).
The above happens with KDE and GNOME.
In the same time I have no problems watching video using VDPAU video output and decoding x264 encoded movie.
I read in the net that lots of users have similar problems and tried a LOT of things in order to prevent this behavior from happening and no luck:
Here is my device section in xorg.conf
=============================
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "TripleBuffer" "false"
Option "BackingStore" "false"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "PixmapCacheSize" "2000000"
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"
Option "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"
Option "AllowIndirectPixmaps" "True"
Option "DamageEvents" "True"
EndSection
=============================
However with or without the additional directives, it does not make much difference.
The only thing that can almost normalize the things for some time are the above mentioned commands which disable and enable PixmapCache
Please help.
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NVIDIA SUPPORT: Response (Mike) 05/13/2011 02:05 PM
He even wrote my name wrong, but I can live with that.
Hi Devan,
Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care.
It appears that you contacted us already about this issue in December 2010 in support case id 101118-000139 which I handled.
Thank you for the new information that flushing the pixmap cache also temporarily works around the problem.
I reviewed the case notes from December and we could not identify or resolve the problem from your logs, and also I tried and could not reproduce the problem with a borrowed laptop with an NVS 140M.
Let me know if there is any additional information about the problem and I will help if I can, but based on the previous and current information unfortunately I could not help you.
Best regards,
Mike
NVIDIA Customer Care
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Me. 05/14/2011 09:57 AM
Hello,
In order to reproduce the issue you really need some time of work on the laptop. You have to agree that the fact that you were unable to reproduce, does not mean that the problem does not exists. I tried different distributions and always get the same behavior and the only thing that fixes it, is switching to nouveau driver. This fact itself means a lot for me.
If you search in google for things like:
nvidia pixmap
nvidia kde slow
and some other similar phrases you will find really long threads (not only for problems with quadro NVS but others too) with many different supposed work arounds. Some threads are old some are new, they blame one thing or another, I have tried all the recommendations in these forums and did not find anything, that eliminates the problem.
If I send you a video file with the speed for simple things, but using different driver, is this going to convince you ?
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NVIDIA SUPPORT 05/16/2011 10:55 AM
THE MOST IMPUDENT ANSWER EVER
Hi Deyan,
I am already convinced that you have a real problem!
The problem is, I can't solve your problem from information in the logs, and I can't solve it by watching a video of the problem.
The only way I can solve this problem is to reproduce it, which is why I borrowed the laptop with NVS 140M and did a lot of testing on it to try to reproduce the problem.
I want to help you but please understand my limitations, as I need relevant information in the log (which was not there) or a reproduction of the problem to help you. Or sometimes I can help if your problem is already known based on the symptoms but this is not the case.
Best regards,
Mike
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ME: 05/18/2011 04:04 AM
Hello,
I am still willing to record a video, so you can see how I reproduce the problem and try to reproduce it for yourself.
I will submit you a video link shortly
I really want to use the nvidia driver.
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NVIDIA SUPPORT 05/18/2011 09:08 AM
OK, I'll watch the video and see if there are steps to reproduce the problem that I missed when I tested this.
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ME: 05/20/2011 12:20 AM
Hello,
I just uploaded the video to youtube.
It does not look very beautiful but you can see more details on full screen.
Here is a link to youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xxxxxxxxx
If you want to take a look at the original uncompressed video,
Here is a link to it too:
http://xxxxxxxxx/xxxxxx.MOV
This was 1 month ago. No answer no nothing after that.
Here there are 2 possibilities:
1. The do know about the problem and now facing the fact that I have a video showing the problem, they just ignore me and no fix provided.
This behavior is BAD BAD BAD.
2. They do not care about my problem and just ignore me. It looks like NVIDIA support is so badly organized that their support department does not even have a supervisor who can monitor their support staff and trying to make them solve users problem.
Again: BAD BAD BAD
This is really annoying and I really hate the fucking video card now.
