Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Let's Talk about Drivers
Installing a dozen video cards with various sets of drivers was the largest annoyance for us during the testing of this review. Obviously, due to license restrictions, NVIDIA and ATI drivers must be installed after the initial OS installation, and cannot be packaged with the kernel. For Windows users not familiar with the process, the kernel module or driver wrapper must be completely recompiled for closed source drivers to work.NVIDIA's drivers are not only supported via SuSE's YOU (the YAST Online Updater), but the drivers easily plug into SuSE without any trouble. We just installed our kernel source, hit init 3, ran the 1.0-6111 binary install, and then followed the instructions on the screen. NVIDIA's drivers provide DRI-like support via SaX2 (the SuSE X configuration tool) as well. Typical video cards us the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) for 3D accelerated graphics. The DRI acts as somewhat of an abstraction layer between X Windows and OpenGL. NVIDIA actually uses their own DRI-like module outside of the standard DRI module. Without DRI or NVIDIA's modules, we are only running software acceleration.
ATI's drivers came out of the box with several problems. We made the initial mistake of installing and testing the entire suite of video cards with the NVIDIA cards/drivers first. We are not entirely sure why, but even after completely removing the NVIDIA kernel module via NVIDIA's uninstall scripts, we still had persistent errors installing the ATI drivers correctly.
Our first test bed was an nForce3 MSI Socket 939 board. We isolated some of our problems to the agpgart module - for older ATI drivers, we need to load a separate specific AGP module on SuSE 9.1 for DRI to load correctly. On our MSI nForce3 board, this should have been the nvidia_agp module. However, try as we could, we could not get nvidia_agp and fglrx to play well with each other. Some of the issues stem from SuSE 9.1 not recognizing the nForce3 chipset correctly, but some issues may stem from ATI drivers just not recognizing everything correctly. After switching to a Socket 939 VIA motherboard, our problems suddenly disappeared. Of course, we had to re-test our entire NVIDIA suite on the new motherboard (we saved it for last the second time around).
Even by switching to a different motherboard, we were not entirely blessed. Using ATI's driver set from their website yielded some results, but first, we made the mistake of using the fglrx package from ATI's website. ATI's implementation of the X Windows configuration completely upsets SaX2, and X will simply ignore the DRI module when we try to load it. Somewhere between playing with various kernel builds, driver builds and hardware configurations, we finally got it right. Our best success with newest SuSE 9.2-RC3 kernel[1] came from using the RPMs and instructions on the supplement FTP site. The 2.6.8 kernel blew away our boot configuration a few times; for whatever reason, VIA SATA controllers are now recognized as SCSI controllers to the new Linux kernel. Without getting too much into detail, we needed to re-edit our mtab, fstab and grub configuration to a different device; the serial ATA drives suddenly became SCSI drives. We finally no longer had errors on the agpgart driver:
linux:~ # dmesg | grep agpgart Linux agpgart interface v0.100 (c) Dave Jones agpgart: Detected AGP bridge 0 agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 941M agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xf0000000 linux:~ #
Footnote
[1] 2.6.8-14-default, you can download it from the SuSE FTP site in the update directory.
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mczak - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"On our MSI nForce3 board, this should have been the nvidia_agp module. However, try as we could, we could not get nvidia_agp and fglrx to play well with each other."This is a mistake, you do not need (and it will not work) the nvidia-agp module. For all A64 based boards, no matter if the chipset is from sis, via, nvidia or someone else, you need the amd64-agp module instead. It might have just worked with that - suse 9.1 loads it automatically for K8T800 chipset, but I think for some reason it doesn't get automatically loaded for nforce3 chipsets. It might have just worked loading it manually, saving you some time :-).
"We are not entirely sure why, but even after completely removing the NVIDIA kernel module, we still had persistent errors installing the ATI drivers correctly."
Removing the kernel module will do nothing. Nvidia drivers replace some of XFree/Xorg libraries, which are incompatible (I think libglx.a is affected by that, but there might be more), and ATI does not have its own version of these files. Uninstalling the nvidia driver with its own installer (which has an uninstall option) should get the original version back in place afaik.
directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Oh, and a note on some SDL games on SUSE. On games like UT (original) and many other games using the same old installer, you need to create /mnt/cdrom and mount your cdrom there, as the installers don't tend to look for SuSE's /media/dvd nonsense, and it will often keep asking you to insert the CDROM.directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
I can't belive noone's mentioned it yet, but Warcraft is an odd example of a game that tends to run better emulated under Cedega (SuSE 9.1) than natively on Windows. Blizzard has a decent relationship with Transgaming. While they won't do a native port of Warcraft III, they are willing to help Transgaming make their game compatible.I would definately like to see AnandTech take a look into this and why various Cedega games run better than others.
Ardan - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Gaming in linux doesn't take hours to achieve. If it took you hours to properly install something like, say, Enemy Territory, then you are doing it all wrong.I have set up gaming in linux on both an ATI and an nvidia card lately and neither are hassles. ATI's Linux development team has been making great strides, so don't sell them short. I fully expect them to start rolling along with new features and better support. Comparing them to when I used nvidia's older linux drivers to what they have now, it took a VERY long time to achieve. However, ATI is making strides in a shorter amount of time. Don't worry about that:)
I loved the article a lot as well, but I would like to point out that the latest ATI drivers are 3.14.1. I do not think that everything has to be open-source to be good in linux. ATI and nvidia are clearly capable of engineering great cards and great drivers, so I am okay with closed-source. Surely it must be an even bigger benefit to them to be able to see the source of the OS they're programming for.
Anandtech, keep up the good work on the Linux articles! They keep getting better and better.
ballero - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Great article.you can use "nvidia-settings" (the control panel) to set up both AA and AF
Pannenkoek - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
UT is not a SDL game, but an OpenGL game in Linux. SDL is a library for making graphical applications easier (made by Epic, open source) and is comparable to DirectX excluding Direct3D.Graphics is a weak spot in Linux, mostly due to the fact that NVIDIA and ATi are paranoid to open their hardware spec so no open source cutting edge video drivers can be made. Stable video drivers, now that would be refreshing.
A stable Linux system will never lock completely, but insert proprietary closed source drivers and redirect all input to X and you get pretty close to the Windows experience.
Fortunately there is finally fast development in the X compartment now that Xfree is dying and with Xorg.
Illissius - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Nice article. Mostly mirrors my experience - I haven't been able to get ATi drivers to install at all (this was a few months ago) on either Mandrake, Knoppix (disk install), or Xandros, which was the point at which I gave up and got an nVidia card, and moved to Gentoo at the same time. Installing the drivers was pretty damn easy as far as Gentoo goes* - 'emerge nvidia-glx', add nvidia to the modules autoload list, change the driver in xorg.conf from 'nv' to 'nvidia', and I think that's about it. Of the games I tried (UT2003 demo, UT2004 demo, Wolfenstein: ET) all worked flawlessly, and as far as I can tell the same speed as under Windows. AA/AF worked also - nVidia has a nice graphical control panel for them too (called 'nvidia-settings' in portage); it's not as full featured as their Windows drivers, but it does the job.* What I like about Gentoo is that although you have to setup most things manually, you generally don't have to touch them again after you do. The distro gives you a lot more control over your entire system than 'user friendly' ones like SuSE/Mandrake/Fedora, as well. ie, if you're fascinated with customization, have tried far too many Windows tweak utilities, and can find your way around the registry well enough, there's a good chance it's the distro for you.
Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
#3, ATi is generally poorer with OpenGL games than nVidia, and Linux doesn't support DirectX (a Windows thing), so it's fairly obvious that the nVidia cards (which are better at OpenGL), will be better than the equivelant ATi cards (which are generally better at Direct 3D stuff - looking at NV3x vs R3xx)Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Have you been working with the 3Dc people? (I notice one of their forum members featuring in a screenshot, an immature one IMO at that ;))Congratulations for putting up a Linux gaming article, it would be nice if you could do older cards though (I was thinking of setting up a machine with a GF4 Ti4400 to run Linux).