VMD-L Mailing List

From: Tommy Wang (chernhoe_at_ima.org.sg)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 20:32:30 CDT

Hi everyone,
        I am using nvidia 2880 drivers on redhat linux 7.3 with the freezing problem
u people described. However, I solved it by switching off the "fast write" to
cpu option in the bios and everything was solved. I basically slowed down the
memory timing on the Geforce3 card slightly, although this did not result in
visible degradation in performance. Hope this helps.

tommy

On Thursday 16 May 2002 00:21, John Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> Several of our local users have downgraded their NVidia drivers
> to the 1541 revision in search of better stability and have
> met with good success with that version of the NVidia drivers.
> Now, just to warn others, that old driver may or may not work with
> the newest GeForce4 boards, but several people are using that old
> driver with good stability. The new drivers seem to be universally
> flaky, though VMD seems to trigger their problems much more than
> other applications do. I suspect that the implementation of antialiasing
> in the new driver is one of the root causes, with VMD anyway.
> Unlike most OpenGL apps, VMD defaults to want "everything on", and
> tries to acquire an antialiased, stereoscopic, stencil-buffered,
> deep Z-bit-depth X visual when it first starts up. Most of the normal
> OpenGL apps don't ask for antialiasing, stereo, or stencil buffers, so
> I suspect that most of the issues here are specific to apps that
> want to use all of those features simultaneously.
> For now, I'd recommend trying their 1541 drivers and see if that
> cures your problem. The 1541 drivers don't support all of the
> OpenGL features found in the newest drivers, but they work, so
> its a trade-off. When we find a better driver version for running
> VMD, I'll post a note here. In the mean time, I'll add some notes
> to the VMD release notes for Linux documenting these issues, so that
> people are aware of the potential problems with the bleeding edge
> NVidia drivers..
>
> Thanks,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 05:47:04PM +0200, Stéphane Teletchéa wrote:
> > Le Vendredi 12 Avril 2002 19:27, John Stone a écrit :
> > > Hi,
> > > To my knowledge, there are a very small selection of video boards
> > > that provide good hardware acceleration on Linux. The NVida boards
> > > provide very good performance on Linux, but you may have to use their
> > > older drivers due to stability problems that seem to have cropped up
> > > in their recent driver releases.
> >
> > I'm encountering problems (hard freeze) on my 8.2 Mdk with a nvidivia
> > GeForceII MX 400 with drivers 1.0-2880.
> > What version do you recommend, on what references do you point the
> > stability problems.
> > Thanks a lot.
> >
> > Stef
> >
> > PS: it never hangs when i don't use vmd ...
> > (other gl apps work fine)
> > Can i stress it in another way ?
> >
> > Stef