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NX on Linux - Graphics card and driver?

tybeede

New member
Hey everybody, I've got NX 5 and 6 installed on OpenSuse 10.3. Everything works good. However, I get a few visual artifacts in sketch mode. I'm thinking my 8800GT and the Nvidia driver I'm using might not be the best combo. I should really have a quadro card but they are much more expensive for what you get. Anyway, I'm hoping some of the people here running NX on linux can report back what video card they have and what version of the Nvidia driver they are running. If you have the nvidia drivers installed you should be able to do a "nvidia-settings" from the command line to get access to the nvidia tool.
 
Most of our systems are using the NVIDIA 7600GS. But we also have deployed the following:
7600GT

7900GTX

7900GT/GTO

Quadro FX 3500

Quadro FX 1400

8600GTS


The Quadro cards do not make a tremendous difference for us. There is a slight speed increase from the 7900 series to the FX 1400--about 5% on timed NX and Pro/E benchmarks. The FX 3500 is probably faster, but we haven't run test on it.

We do not see any problem with the consumer level cards (ex: 7600GS, 8600GTS), so it is unlikely that you problem is due to not having a Quadro.

Here is some information from our IT department:

Almost all our systems are using the Ubuntu-prepared Nvidia Restricted
Drivers. We have also used systems with Debian Lenny with Nvidia drivers
downloaded from their website and compiled.

You can type "lspci | grep VGA" to get your card name
which will work if you do not have the nvidia utilities installed.

"I would be willing to bet you could run NX on almost any Nvidia card made in the last 3-4 years. NX also defaults (IIRC) to not using anti-aliasing."

It is possible you are using the 'nv' open source nvidia driver that <b ="moz-txt-star">does not[/b] support hardware acceleration.

You can make sure you are using direct rendering "aka hardware accel." by
running "glxinfo | grep render"

You also can see information from his Xorg config by doing:
"grep nvidia /etc/X11/xorg.conf"

If you do not see 'Driver "nvidia"' in the output, you are probably using the 'nv' driver (which could be confirmed by doing the grep with nv instead of nvidia).
</pre>
 
Our guess is that the visual artifacts may be a hardware issue. Many of the consumer-level NVIDIA cards are "overclocked" meaning they run the graphics processor faster than it is specified to be run. This generates more heat which, depending on your system, may not be being removed fast enough.

We have even seen non-overclocked cards exhibit visual artifacts due to overheating in systems with inadequate cooling. This is most common on video cards with passive heat sinks, as they require better airflow inside the computer to perform properly.

You might try removing the cover of you system, and seeing what happens. Or simply leave you computer off long enough for it to cool down, and see if the problem happens immediately after you start.
 

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