Linux nvidia drivers (1.0.9629)

In a previous post I took a brief look at where we were with 3d rendering on linux and where we had come from. We are seeing the shift from Xgl to AIGLX and Compiz to Beryl. In my efforts to upgrade both my laptop (with an ati r300 card) and desktop (nvidia 7800gtx) I had the following experience. Laptop Although the r300 is suppose to be supported by the Free open source ati drivers I was not able to get it running with AIGLX. Since the propriatory drivers do not work with AIGLX yet, I was forced to go back to Xgl on my notebook. However, I still endeavour to switch Compiz over to Beryl. Desktop Nvidia's latest beta drivers (v1.0.9626) provide support for opengl rendering in the driver. So, when using the beta drivers, nor Xgl or AIGLX are required. This means the latest beta drivers can be used with the standard modular xorg. One thing I noticed with the combination of latest beta nvidia driver and beryl, is the reduced overhead in system resources. It's hard to say whether this is the nvidia driver compared to Xgl or Beryl compared to Compiz. The system performance is much more consistent and doesn't fluctuate as much as I found Xgl and Compiz did. Bearing in mind this is the first beta release incpororating such functionality, it's a welcome change from Nvidia. Twinview One problem that has been around since Xgl first came onto the scene is dual monitor support. Xgl and compiz didn't support proper xinerama mode. That is, multi-monitor support. Whilst it did work, there were quirks; Maximising a window on one screen was not possible. It would maximise across both screens. Beryl however has recently had twinview support patched in which fixes this problem. Whilst twinview is still a bit broken in beryl it is a step closer. I've already checked and bug reports have already been ticketed so these remainging issues should be cleared up very quickly. Games Playing games in Xgl is extremely difficult and in most cases it just won't work. You can open up another xnest (that is not running xgl) and launch your game from there or close down Xgl and start a normal x session. This is however annoying at best. Because this rendering is always on in Xgl, games and other 3d software can't acquire a opengl or directx (if using wine) context. AIGLX fixes this problem via in(direct) rendering (which nvidia's latest beta driver does internally now too). An example of the latest beta nvidia drivers running beryl and playing WoW (via wine) windowed with a hardware accelerated movie (Lost) An example of WoW in windowed mode maximised to fullscreen. Notice it only maximise to one screen as you would expect. Previously, this was not possible. Verdict It's getting easier and easier to get Beryl and Emerald (the actual window manager that replaces metacity) running. If you are using a newish nvidia card you can skip installing Xgl or setting up Xorg for AIGLX extension. The opengl select_texture_from_pixmap support is already provided by the driver. It's just a matter of updating to this beta driver and installing Beryl and Emerald. All in all, from a working system if you know exactly what you are doing it takes about half an hour. I was recompiling all my source too (gentoo user here :) so it may even be quicker on other distros. Links Gentoo xeffects wiki This has now taken over from the Coffee Buzz wiki and provides some information on how to setup all the aforementioned on Gentoo. Beryl Project If you want to find out more about the Beryl Project. Good for any distribution. SVN overlay Gentoo users can now use this xeffects overlay instead of the old coffee buzz overlay. Whilst gentoo now has ebuilds in portage for Beryl, I would use this SVN overlay and re-sync it as often as you like to keep up to date.