# New NVIDIA card and video [Solved]

## statmobile

Hey all,

Just got a shiny new GeForce 6200, and was hoping to enjoy the world of beryl.  It was neat, although a bit too unstable for my liking.  Anyway, I've noticed this new odd problem.  I can start watching video in kaffeine or Mythtv, and everything appears great.  Then all of a sudden (not sure what I do to cause it), the video turns into the static.  The sound continues working, and the application doesn't crash, but there's nothing I can do to recover the video.  Any ideas on what my problem could be?

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## xoomix

Couple questions:

1. Can you kill the player and then re-start the video right away and it then works again for a while?

2. Is it only video? What about gaming, etc.?

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## statmobile

I can kill the video player, but opening it again is still just fuzz.  I'm not sure about games, since I don't really play them on my machine.

If I come back to my machine in a couple of hours, then it runs fine again, and then the problem comes back.

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## xoomix

This sounds like the 6200 I got back built into my Gateway PC - it had only a heat-sink and no fan - and it simply overheated after a while causing anomalies. Might this be the case with yours?

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## coolsnowmen

 *Quote:*   

> simply overheated after a while causing anomalies. Might this be the case with yours?

 

This could very well be the case.  Even if you have a fan, you sometimes need to use some compressed air to blow off the dust.  I guess your's is new so that shouldn't be a problem, but I live in a dusty environment and if I don't blow off my heat sinks on my main cpu every so often, my computer goes into random reboot because the dust(looks kinda like lint) prevents the heat sinks from doing their job.

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## statmobile

That doesn't make much sense to me.  I mean, if this thing was overheating wouldn't I be experiencing other major problems with the display?  Right now the only problem is that the video get jumbled, and it seems to happen when I bring another application to the front.

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## xoomix

Stat:

Sorry if it doesn't make sense to you - but the way you are explaining it, with you waiting and coming back and it's ok for a while, and the fact that I personally had a 6200 that overheated - just screams overheat to me. What have you done thus far to rule this out? Have you ran your pc with the side cover off yet so that when it goes berserk you can feel the card/heatsink and see if it burns the hell outta you? Does it, or does it not have a fan? Or is it just a heatsink as well?

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## statmobile

xoomix,

I don't mean to sound unappreciative here xoomix, I just fail to see the fast conclusion that it's overheating.  As of last night, I tried watching video, and it got scrambled once again.  But then I dropped a DVD in, and that played fine.  That doesn't seem like an overheated video card to me.

To be honest, hardware failure is always the last conclusion for me.  I have faith that the quality control of companies will take care of the hardware, and it's usually my ignorance that is the source of the problem.  With that said, I believe it is possible that the hardware if faulty, but I would like to explore other options as well.  

The card only has a heat sink, and no fans.  When I get home from work tonight, I'll try to check the heat of the card without actually burning myself  :Wink: 

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## xoomix

No problem at all - I am like you, hardware usually is one of the very last things that you would consider. Yours was a special case purely for the fact that you "Just got a shiny new GeForce 6200" - you never mentioned if anything else had changed, so it kinda stick out like a sore thumb. You also had not mentioned, until your very last post, that it will act ok on some things and not ok on others.

But yes, test it out later and report your findings  :Smile: 

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## Drone1

Although I concur with 'xoomix' on this, I'm willing to look into something more specific. You stated it can play DVD without problem, shortly after it goes static on you... what kind of file were you watching in kaffeine or mythtv? Are you watching liveTV via mpg2 encoder card, copied divx video? This sounds like something more specific, like video type issues. It also screams, IMO, of video buffer issues, but that's just because my mythbox has me going loopy.

my $.02

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## statmobile

Here's an update:

I have the machine opened up right next to me right now, and I don't feel any excessive heat problems.  

What I do suspect the problem to be is something with the AGP drivers or the depth I use in my xorg.conf file.  I have been playing with this, and getting various results.  I'll let you know what I figure out as soon as I am sure of what the final stable configuration is.

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## statmobile

I guess the problem has something to do with the AGP drivers.  Apparently, either one of them causes the problem.  I just finished watching TV on myth after playing with all the beryl toys, and it works fine.  I removed /dev/agpgart from the kernel, and I also added the following line to my xorg.conf under the device section:

```

    Option "NvAGP" "2"

```

Which tells the nvidia drivers to only use the /dev/agpgart drivers, and since this doesn't exist nothing gets used as can be seen here

```

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status 

Status:          Disabled

AGP initialization failed, please check the ouput  

of the 'dmesg' command and/or your system log file 

for additional information on this problem. 

```

I tried running this with agpgart or with NvAGP drivers, and neither one of them worked.  I'm not even sure what these drivers do, since I'm clearly using my AGP slot for the video card, and I am getting video.  My MB does 4x, but the card is 8x, but this adjusts to 4x when using the drivers.  I'm not sure why this gets all messed up, but I am confident that this is causing the problem.

To be fair, this is a really old motherboard, and that's why I only bought this video card on the cheap.  There was no reason to buy an expensive video card where the bottlenecks lie in the entire system.

On a side not, wow beryl really is quite impressive.  I'm writing this message on my ibook using OS X, and I'm already finding myself missing all the goodies that beryl offers on my desktop server.

Any input on what is going on here would be much appreciated.

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## xoomix

So --

With the driver thingy, however it is working now, is it actually running 3D still? After removing the /dev/agpgart stuff does glxinfo show direct rendering = yes?

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## statmobile

 *xoomix wrote:*   

> With the driver thingy, however it is working now, is it actually running 3D still? After removing the /dev/agpgart stuff does glxinfo show direct rendering = yes?

 

Yeah, direct rendering is enabled.  I read some stuff about agpgart last night, and it almost seems like it's useful for on-board graphics.  Maybe it's not useful for me, when my card has 256 MB DDR on it, so I shouldn't really need to worry about using shared memory for graphics.

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## danyer

Sorry to return to the temperature thing.

I have a 6200 and it works perfectly. It is fanless.

The thing is, install nvidia-settings version 1.0.20061102

It displays the temperature of the card. Mine is 44 at idle, and around 54 after playing UT2004.

This way you'll remove the temperature out of the equation.

Good luck,

Dan.

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## agent_jdh

 *statmobile wrote:*   

> Yeah, direct rendering is enabled.  I read some stuff about agpgart last night, and it almost seems like it's useful for on-board graphics.  Maybe it's not useful for me, when my card has 256 MB DDR on it, so I shouldn't really need to worry about using shared memory for graphics.

 

The NVidia driver package installs its own AGP driver, so you don't need agpgart in the kernel (although you can use xorg.conf to select whether to use the kernel or nvidia's agp support if you prefer using agpgart).  Running lsmod should show you if the nvidia module is loaded.

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## statmobile

 *agent_jdh wrote:*   

> The NVidia driver package installs its own AGP driver, so you don't need agpgart in the kernel (although you can use xorg.conf to select whether to use the kernel or nvidia's agp support if you prefer using agpgart).  Running lsmod should show you if the nvidia module is loaded.

 

I understand this, but my problem is that video would fail to work, or X would hang when I used either agpgart or NVIDIA's AGP driver (with and without agpgart in the kernel).  The only stable performance I got was when I disabled AGP altogether.

As for temperature, I guess I wasn't clear that I used nvidia-settings as well, and there never appeared to be a temperature issue.

I will mark this as solved unless someone thinks it's worth continuing this thread.

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