Hi.
Can someone recommend me a good set of nVidia drivers, well-optimised for my gf5900xt? Of course, the drivers included in my Fedora 7 are good enough but by sticking to them I can forget about everything regarding GL-support, which is my current issue.

After painful install of 1.0.9631 driver, xorg.conf modifications, I got it all working, including Beryl and all other stuff regarding GL that I need. However, at some occassions I experience terrible slowdowns in anything regarding GL, sometimes even when playing back movies.

My system is an Athlon XP 2000+ with 768MB ram and the mentioned Gforce 5900 card. Not exactly up-to-date-computer, I know, but more than enough for a simple GL screensaver written in 1999 or something (Hell, if it can run all Win-games made until 2005 on quite high detail + getting decent framerate, a thiny GL screen saver shouldn't be problem!). I experience jerky graphic in some of these GL screensavers (eg. "Colorfire", in Gnome-Glx-screensvares), especially when running some torrent-downloads, but no matter in what occassion these slowdowns / graphics jerkyness / stuttering occur - I'm quite sure my global CPU usage never gets more than 30% so I shouldn't be experiencing stuff like this - should I ?

So, I'm quite convinced it has to do with my graphic drivers. After doing some research on the net, people do have similar problems sometimes, even on the top-notch hardware and having difficulties choosing right drivers. Feels like a minefield looking for a stable driver. So, since I don't have latest hardware, I was thinking going back to older versions and see whether they are more stable. Do you have any older driver version (preferably NOT from nVidia site, but through repositories-install) to recommend for me? It must be stable with desktop effects/Beryl and GL in general. How about older 7185 Legacy drivers? Or new 9762? I don't want to (re)install these things no more than necessary. Give me experiences of yours...

Thanks in advance!

M.

Not sure, have all systems running the nvidia drivers from the nvidia site. I think that is the best way to get full 3d support.

Thanks for the reply.

First of all, I've read something about "it's not a good idea installing nVidia drivers from their site", due some "compiling-thing of Kernel". I'm quite newbie som I'm not quite sure what negative things that can cause.

Also, what's the difference between Livna vs. nVidia drivers? Who develops the first mentioned?

Also, now I managed to track down the main cause of my graphic/GL issue. You'll probably think I'm crazy but - the mentioned jerkyness/stuttering in screensavers and such occur when my Bittorrent client (any Bittorrent I've tried, I'm using Deluge at the moment) is activated and it happens in the same rythm with counting of current download/upload speed (every time a value changes, the graphic stutters in screensaver too!). The problems seems to disapear when the torrent program is minimised to sys-tray.

Any ideas what's wrong?

Now, the irony in all this that I started testing/exploring Linux because I've heard so much about it being stable and all - and it sure is, while you are using terminal-black-and-grey screen, but as soon as X starts, man, I've never ever experienced anything this unstable in Windows environment.

Did you use these instructions to set up your video driver?

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99285


I can't get fedora to the command prompt or to x to try it out . Prolly why I'm still a slacker, neverknow .

If you are having problems with the nvidia drivers that will usually cause instability, even in windows if something goes awry. If the driver is not truly compatible with your nvidia card might need to try another distro or an earlier version till they get it updated.

Well, yes, I pretty much did it the way described above...

Might try getting admins to move to fedora, although its a hardware issue, might get better support there.