Comment Stay away from NVIDIA (at least for now)!!! (Score 2) 181
I have had some personal experience with NVIDIA cards and Linux running on an SMP system. To sum it up briefly:
NVIDIA + SMP = BAD CHOICE!!!
In the graphics lab where I work we have about 10 dual CPU Dell's with GeForce2MX graphics cards, which the lab purchased on my reccomendation :-(. We are running Linux 2.17 and XFree 4.0.1, with the latest NVIDIA drivers (version 0.9-5). The only way we could get the system work reliably was to turn the hardware 3D off and use the Mesa libraries (that come with XFree). With the hardware 3D acceleration turned on the machines keept locking up, and always under different circumstances, mostly though when more than one OpenGL context was active at a time. But some credit is due to NVIDIA - Descent 3 was running always without any problems with 3D h/w accel. turned on.
If you check the NVIDIA's LINUX FAQ, they acknowledge the SMP problem exists and promised it would be fixed in the next release. Maybe I would believe them, except that that's exactly what they promised in the FAQ that came with the previous release:-( ...draw your own conclusions. I personally don't think there are enough SMP users out there yet to make it a serious enough concern for NVDIDIA to fix this problem.
If you decide to go with a single CPU system, the card is quite reliable and fast, although I did lock up the system after couple of days. With SMP system, you have basically two choices: disable h/w 3D acceleration or run only Descent 3 :-)
We tried 4 different versions of NVIDIA's cards (TNT2, GeForce, GeForce2 MX and GTS) with 3 different kernels (2.14, 2.16, 2.17) but the results were all the same - lockups, lockups and more lockups. We even tried to experiment with turning on/off DMA for our hard-drives, without success. Sometimes the entire system would freeze up - could not even ping it; sometimes only the X-server locked up, which could be re-started remotely. The lockups would occur sometimes after only 20 seconds of work. On occasions all you would have to do freeze the system was to start a single OGL application. Other times the system would work fine for up to 30 minutes, with five OGL windows running simultaneously, but then freeze when you quit one of them... completely unstable and unpredictable system.
I have not tried the h/w 3D acceleration with the new 2.4 kernel yet. Perhaps someone else has, in which case I would love to hear their story.
Pavol Federl
email: pfederl@netscape.net
NVIDIA + SMP = BAD CHOICE!!!
In the graphics lab where I work we have about 10 dual CPU Dell's with GeForce2MX graphics cards, which the lab purchased on my reccomendation
If you check the NVIDIA's LINUX FAQ, they acknowledge the SMP problem exists and promised it would be fixed in the next release. Maybe I would believe them, except that that's exactly what they promised in the FAQ that came with the previous release:-(
If you decide to go with a single CPU system, the card is quite reliable and fast, although I did lock up the system after couple of days. With SMP system, you have basically two choices: disable h/w 3D acceleration or run only Descent 3
We tried 4 different versions of NVIDIA's cards (TNT2, GeForce, GeForce2 MX and GTS) with 3 different kernels (2.14, 2.16, 2.17) but the results were all the same - lockups, lockups and more lockups. We even tried to experiment with turning on/off DMA for our hard-drives, without success. Sometimes the entire system would freeze up - could not even ping it; sometimes only the X-server locked up, which could be re-started remotely. The lockups would occur sometimes after only 20 seconds of work. On occasions all you would have to do freeze the system was to start a single OGL application. Other times the system would work fine for up to 30 minutes, with five OGL windows running simultaneously, but then freeze when you quit one of them... completely unstable and unpredictable system.
I have not tried the h/w 3D acceleration with the new 2.4 kernel yet. Perhaps someone else has, in which case I would love to hear their story.
Pavol Federl
email: pfederl@netscape.net
