n01getsout.com’s blog

I finally got tired of trying to get my ATI Radeon 9000 Pro to work properly with Linux. I had to jump through hoops to get Google Earth to work, I had to turn of stars in Celestia with gconf-editor to prevent it from crashing, Neverwinter Nights would crash at random, and I had problems with certain color-depth / resolution combinations. I kept hearing that NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers work much better than ATI’s, and with the fact that ATI will no longer produce drivers for the Radeon 9000 Pro, I decided to purchase a NVIDIA graphics card.

I found a XFX GeForce 6200 8x AGP with 256MB DDR2 at Buy.com for $58 - $20 from signing up for Google Checkout - $10 mail in rebate = $28 final price (no tax or shipping). Not bad. A few days later I have the card and put it in my machine. X.org does not load on startup. Whoops, I forgot to change the driver from fglrx to the open source X.org driver nv. I do that and X starts up fine. I uninstall fglrx and install the components necessary for the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (nvidia-kernel-common, nvidia-glx, nvidia-settings). I then log in as root and run m-a auto-install nvidia. All goes well and I change the driver in my xorg.conf to nvidia.

I reboot and X comes up. I fire up Warsow and prepare to be impressed. I don’t know why I ever expect hardware to just work for me as I always have to tinker with it. The graphics look horribly garbled and frame rates are low. I launch Neverball and it looks just fine. I launch Enemy Territory and the graphics are somewhat garbled. I play with the OpenGL extensions in Warsow and find that turning off multitexturing solves my problem. My only concern with that is the card supports multitexturing. I do some research and come across the Debian Wiki for NVIDIA drivers. I run glxinfo | grep rendering to check if it is working and it says that direct rendering is not enabled. I follow the instructions on how to enable direct rendering and it works like a charm. Google Earth starts without any problems, Neverwinter Nights runs smooth, Celestia can show me the heavens once again, and Warsow looks awesome.