Beryl, Sabayon 3.4 and NVIDIA legacy drivers

[archwndas]

Hi guys, I have successfully installed Sabayon 3.4 x86 in an old laptop with a pentium 4 2.66GHz CPU and NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420Go. I had to "emerge -C" the NVIDIA drivers and "emerge" the nvidia-legacy-drivers. Still Compiz doesn't work though which is expected. I was wondering whether or not I could "emerge" and use Beryl in Sabayon 3.4 with the NVIDIA legacy drivers 7184 version.

Does any Sabayon Expert out there could tell me the steps to do something like that if I am allowed to do so?

Thanks in advance...

[Raqua]

Hello.
This is exactly what I did as well. I noticed, that using legacy drivers gives me much worse performance than using older 'normal' drivers. I stayed at (not sure) maybe 98xx.

[archwndas]

Legacy drivers are the old drivers series 71XX and 86XX if I remember correctly. The new drivers are the series: 96XX and 97XX. There is not 98XX series of Nvidia drivers if I remember correctly. Regarding performance are you sure you measure performance with 24bit in all cases. DefaultDepth in all cases should be 24. If you change it to 16 then the performance increases.

[Raqua]

I did not changed anything in my xorg.conf. It was 1600x1200 at 24bit depth.

With legacy drivers I got 60Hz on 19" monitor and when I emerged the old version of standard nvidia drivers I am running at 70Hz.

I even swithed back to legacy drivers to confirm this. I do not know, why is it like that, but it is a fact. I have GeForce 440 video card.

[archwndas]

First of all let us know if you understood which are the Nvidia Legacy drivers and which are the Nvidia drivers. From your first post you seem not to know which is which.

[wolfden]

Newer cards such as the GeForce 8, 7, 6, and FX 5 series should use the newer drivers from the 100.x series.

Older cards such as the GeForce 3 or GeForce 4 series require the 96xx drivers. For these cards, you should mask >=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9700 in your /etc/portage/package.mask file. This will prevent newer versions of the driver which are incompatible with your card from being installed.

Old NV2x-based cards (such as TNT, TNT2, GeForce, and GeForce 2) require the older 71xx drivers (such as nvidia-drivers-1.0.7185). For these cards, you should mask >=nvidia-drivers-1.0.8700 in /etc/portage/package.mask.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

[Raqua]

First of all let us know if you understood which are the Nvidia Legacy drivers and which are the Nvidia drivers. From your first post you seem not to know which is which.

Well, as far as I see, there are two packages of nvidia drivers in portage:

Code: Select all

*  x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers
      Latest version available: 1.0.9631-r1
      Latest version installed: 1.0.9631-r1
      Size of files: 25,861 kB
      Homepage:      http://www.nvidia.com/
      Description:   NVIDIA X11 driver and GLX libraries
      License:       NVIDIA

*  x11-drivers/nvidia-legacy-drivers
      Latest version available: 1.0.7184-r91
      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
      Size of files: 14,023 kB
      Homepage:      http://www.nvidia.com/
      Description:   NVIDIA X11 driver and GLX libraries for older NVIDIA cards
      License:       NVIDIA


Just to make it easier to understand, let's call nvidia-drivers package A and nvidia-legacy-drivers package B.

When I installed Sabayon 3.3 to my machine, it came with A of some version. After I upgraded it to a new version, it stopped working because the support of my card was removed from A drivers and I was advised to switch to B drivers where my card has been moved.
After I switched to latest version of B drivers, everything worked again, but with a worse performance. So I switched to the A drivers again but masked all new versions and keep the one that just work for me.
So what I am trying to say is, do not move to package B, just revert to the older versions of A and stop upgrading, it works better.
Now when I check the driver versions of both packages it makes perfect sense that version 1.0.9631 works better than 1.0.7184.