Nvidia drivers really slow

[oaul]

I have debian and ubuntu installed in my box. For some reason, Debian is much slower graphics-wise than ubuntu and both are setup for nvidia drivers.
And no I dont have a slow computer/GPU:

AMD 64 3400+
Geforce 6800 GT
1 gig

To give you an idea, clicking and dragging selection boxes on the desktop is jerky in debian. Not so in ubuntu.

Glxgears gives about 3000 in debian while ubuntu gives a whopping 13,000.

Its like this for pretty much everything - from surfing the net to watching movies to playing doom 3.

I have a 2.6.18 kernel (no nvidiafb) and upgraded to Etch. Anyone have any experience with this sort of problem?

[techieMoe]

Are you absolutely sure that your Nvidia drivers were properly installed on Debian? It sounds to me like you're still using the non-accelerated nv drivers.

[antidrugue]

I use Debian Etch as well and never had any troubles with the NVIDIA drivers.

Make sure both /etc/X11/xorg.conf and

glxinfo

says you are using them.

[oaul]

$ lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia 4543892 12
agpgart 30592 1 nvidia
i2c_core 20032 1 nvidia

$ cat </etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep nvidia
# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 1.0 (buildmeister@builder3) Mon Oct 16 22:13:07 PDT 2006
Driver "nvidia"

$ glxinfo | grep NVIDIA
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL version string: 2.0.2 NVIDIA 87.76


Pretty sure theyre installed - Doom 3 runs but its barely playable.

Things are even slower when "nv" is enabled in xorg.conf

I am absolutely sure that i am not getting the most out of these nvidia drivers

[oaul]

FOUND PROBLEM - ADVICE NEEDED

Apparently $nvidia-settings
lists the bus type as PCI when it should be AGP 8x. No doubt this is the problem

The question is how to fix it.
Im 75% sure that i incorrectly configured my kernel. I find this strange though becase agpgart is listed under lsmod as is.

Does anybody know of a specific instance of compiling support for AGP Bus in 2.6 kernels? I will find this out myself when I reconfigure it but it would be nice to know if there is in fact AGP support somewhere in the kernel.

[Zelmo]

Go into your /boot folder and find the config file for your kernel. Look at it using less, and search for AGP (hit the slash key, type AGP, and hit Enter). You should then see CONFIG_AGP=y at the top of the screen, with AGP highlighted. Below that are several lines related to AGP. One of them is CONFIG_AGP_NVIDIA, and on my machine it is set to y, meaning it's compiled in. I compiled it in myself, so if you're using a stock kernel, it may be set to m (module). The important thing is that it's not commented out.

The second thing that comes to mind is an xorg.conf option called "NvAGP" which can go in the Screen section or the Device section. See Appendix F of Nvidia's release notes for details about configuring AGP.

[oaul]

Fixed. In case anyone else has this problem - apparently my AGP entries in the kernel config were set to "m." Set it to "y", recompiled and it works flawlessly. May do the same for others...

I am in love with you all.