[vtkusers] VTK performance with GeForce2 (RedHat 7.1 with NVidia drivers)

[David Gobbi]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Dave Reed wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 17:49:46 +0200
>
> Yes, the documentation does mention compiling AGPGART support in the
> kernel but didn't provide any details.  I'll have to look into this
> more.

Your kernel should already have an agpgart module compiled.  First
check to make sure that the NVdriver is not loaded (quit X, run
/sbin/rmmod NVdriver; /sbin/lsmod ) and then try to load agpgart
(/sbin/modprobe agpgart).  (Note that if you have both NVdriver and
agpgart loaded at the same time, your computer is likely to freeze
or crash.)

> > > Can anyone confirm that I should get a more significant improvement
> > > with the GeForce2 card?  And also, if anyone has any suggestions for

The nVidia boards, particularly the GeForce2, are incredible for textures.
For geometry (i.e. loads of polygons) they aren't really anything special,
regardless of nVidia's geometry-and-lighting GPU.  Two-year-old cards
from 3DLabs, Sun, or SGI (meaning the SGI 320 and 540) can beat a GeForce2
in geometry performance by a fair margin.

> > > problem and solved it. I'm wondering if the NVidia's kernel driver
> > > isn't set up for the changes in the Linux 2.4 kernel. I found some
> > > old messages that it wasn't setup for the 2.3.x development kernel but
> > > they would have a fix so I would think it would be ready by now.

We use nVidia's drivers both with the 2.2 kernels and the 2.4 kernels.
So far we haven't had any problems, and AGP works fine, but all our
motherboards are either Intel boards or common VIA-based boards.

> I'll drop it after this message since this is a little off-topic, but
> if someone can confirm that I should get better than a speedup of two
> or that I really need to get AGP support to get a decent speedup, I'd
> love to hear that in a private e-mail.

The speedup depends on what you are doing.  Our work is very
texture-intensive, and for our applications the GeForce2 is easily
four times as fast as a TNT2.  If you're drawing a large number of
polygons and not using textures, however, you should upgrade your
CPU (if this is possible) rather than your video board.

 - David