# Switching from Geforce to Savage card

## sarnold

Howdy:

I now have 2 more Gentoo installs under my belt, so I've learned a bit more in the last few weeks...  But I have some XFree/glx/etc questions on my first Gentoo box.

When I first built it, I had a gforce DDR card (and older 32 meg one) , so I merged the nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx stuff, and it all worked.  Not by choice, I had to swap the gforce for a savage 4 card.   I updated the X config file to load the savage driver, and umerged the nvidia packages.

However, I can't get X to load now without removing the "load glx" thing.  It looks like it's linked against the nvidia stuff, so what do I need to rebuild to make it all work again?

Do I need to remerge all of xfree?  Or is there an easier/faster way?

Thanks in advance for any tips...

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## elboricua

Easy way is to to do 

opengl-update xfree

That will switch over to the default xfree gl.  See if with that you can get into X.  Good luck  :Smile: 

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## sarnold

Okay, now I can boot X with "load glx" there, and I don't get the "missing glx on display 0.0" message anymore (thanks!).

However, some of my software is still horked (ie, xawtv has no picture now).  I tried remerging xawtv, but it still thinks I have a dependency on NVIDIA-kernel, etc.

How do I stop that?  I looked in make.conf, but there's no nvidia USE flag.  What else do I need to rebuild to make that dependency go away?

Thanks again (and in advance)...

Steve

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## sarnold

Okay, I rebuilt my kernel after removing all nvidia support.  Although there was no savage support (in either the dri/agp section or the framebuffer section) I enabled dri and framebuffer support anyway (just without any card-specific modules).

I then rebuilt xawtv and it built fine (without pulling in nvidia-kernel) but I still have no picture :-(

Here's my current X modules:

```

Section "Module"

# This loads the DBE extension module.

    Load        "dbe"   # Double buffer extension

# This loads the miscellaneous extensions module, and disables

# initialisation of the XFree86-DGA extension within that module.

    SubSection  "extmod"

#      Option    "omit xfree86-dga"   # don't initialise the DGA extension

    EndSubSection

# This is for my TV card (bttv and v4l stuff). Also the DGA comment above.

    Load        "v4l"

# This loads the Type1 and FreeType font modules

    Load        "type1"

    Load        "freetype"

# This loads the GLX module

    Load       "glx"

EndSection

```

How do I get back my xawtv?  It should not require hardware 3D support to use xawtv, right?  I would like a card with explicit kernel support, though; I still have an old Banshee card I can throw in here.  Would that help?

This is not really the right forum for this topic, but it's where I found the closest thing to an answer for my original question; can an admin person move this to Multimedia, or should I start a new thread over there?

Thanks in advance, Steve

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## DocGonzo

Maybe you could try some of the different video extensions of xawtv (-dga/-vm/-xv/-gl) and look if one of them works. Try "xawtv --help" for a list. Maybe worth a try ...

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## sarnold

Thanks; if I use the -noxv option, I get a picture again (yay!) but the screen flickers horribly if the mouse gets near the xawtv video window.  Also, the video window is stuck across all desktops (just without any window borders or anything).

I guess I need to put a better video card back in this box.  I'll have to do more work on the other machine I swapped cards with, but I can get the geforce card back if I need to, or I could try the Voodoo Banshee card (I know the latter works with xv/bttv/xawtv because I had it working in my old machine).

Any recommendations?

Thanks again, Steve

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## DocGonzo

Looks like you don't have the Xv-Extension loaded. Maybe you got none with the savage card. But maybe you have disabled it when you set up the nvidia stuff. Look into the NVidia-howto in the gentoo-docs, go from bottom to top and bring all the modifikations in the XF86Config back to the old settings.

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## sarnold

Well, I decided to swap cards back, so now I have the geforce on gentoo and the savage is back in mom's redhat box.  I used the pobox savage drivers, which seems to have fixed the xscreensaver lockups, and dvds play fine.

So now I put back the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel stuff, and glxgears (running in a little window) gives me:

```
sarnold@newton sarnold $ glxgears

3932 frames in 5.0 seconds = 786.400 FPS

4561 frames in 5.0 seconds = 912.200 FPS

4582 frames in 5.0 seconds = 916.400 FPS

4563 frames in 5.0 seconds = 912.600 FPS

4191 frames in 5.0 seconds = 838.200 FPS

```

Is that good?  I have a geforce 256 DDR (older and cheap) on a classic athlon 750 with 384 megs of RAM.

One other thing, although I got xawtv working again, it doesn't give me the little thnumbnails in the channel window.  I had them before, but I'm not sure if it was before or after the initial card swap (so I'm not sure if I had them with the savage card or the geforce card)

So could it be a hardware limitation, or did I hork up the software?

I'lll have to do some more homework...

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## floam

it might be good considering how old your hardware is, I get ~7000 fps on my geforce4 4400 and athlon xp 2100

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## DuF

Just for information, on my duron 850, with 512Mo ram sdr on abit kt7a (via kt133) and a geforce2 pro I have : 

```
charli@gentoo:~$ glxgears 

9871 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1974.200 FPS

10017 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2003.400 FPS

10088 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2017.600 FPS

10053 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2010.600 FPS

9825 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1965.000 FPS

9919 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1983.800 FPS

10093 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2018.600 FPS

10047 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2009.400 FPS

```

I have AGP4x enabled, but that seems more unstable than in AGP2x. When I'm in AGP2x, if I'm remember, I think that I'm around 1600FPS.

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## sarnold

 *floam wrote:*   

> it might be good considering how old your hardware is, I get ~7000 fps on my geforce4 4400 and athlon xp 2100

 

"floam"?  Have you heard Phish's Foam?

Just wondering...  ;-)

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## floam

no I havn't  :Razz: 

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## pjp

Moved from Gamers & Players.

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## pilla

I have a SuperSavage and glxgears give me only 140 frames/sec. Anyway, xv works and I can play films in my notebook (PIII 1.2GHz). Not enough for gaming, but enough to play films.

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