NVidia proprietary driver tweaks

by Alex Musolino — last modified Jan 06, 2009 03:02 AM

— filed under: Video Solutions, Desktop

Users of certain NVidia VGA devices may suffer from performance issues inherent in some current proprietary NVidia drivers. This guide shows how to potentially fix these problems and set your system up to apply the changes necessary each time the X server starts and/or you log in.

Applicable to Fedora Versions

Fedora 9
Fedora 10

Requirements

This guide assumes you have set up your system to use the NVidia proprietary drivers from the RPMfusion repos according to Configuring a nVidia Card and Kernel Modules. Alternatively, you can use akmods - see Using akmods.

Doing the work

Using nvidia-settings

Open a Terminal.
Execute the following:
```
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2
```
Now try dragging windows around, scrolling web pages in Firefox, using Plasma (KDE 4). Depending on your particular card, driver version and planetary alignment the above command may be all that is required and these tasks should be nice a smooth (or at least improved). If not, you may try running the command again, but specifying values of 1 and then 3 for InitialPixmapPlacement. Stick with the one that yields the best results.
Now to make this change stick, type the following in the Terminal:
```
cat >> ~/.xinitrc << EOF
# Tweak the NVidia driver
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2
EOF
```
Note: If you found that a different value for InitialPixmapPlacement yielded better results, use that instead of 2 here.

X.org settings

Open a Terminal.
Log in as root.
Although recent Fedora releases ship a version X.org that does not require a config file, the installation of the NVidia kmods will create one for you. At this point it is a good idea to make a back up. Type the following:
```
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
```
Now open /etc/X11/xorg.conf in your favourite text editor. For example, nano (not my favourite, but it's simple and it works):
```
nano -w /etc/X11/xorg.conf
```

Locate your Device section. It should look something like the following:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Videocard0"
    Driver     "nvidia"
EndSection

Now you can add as many of the following options as you like to the Device section:

Option      "RenderAccel"               "True"
Option      "UseEvents"                 "False"
Option      "TripleBuffer"              "1"    
Option      "DamageEvents"              "1"    
Option      "PixmapCacheSize"           "70000"
Option      "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts"  "True"

To add these to your Device section they must appear between the Section "Device" and the EndSection lines.
You may also like to experiment with higher values for PixmapCacheSize.

Another option you could try is:
```
Option     "BackingStore"               "1"
```
WARNING: This option may cause your X to become quite unstable - it did for me. As such, I only offer you this because I have read that it can help with some cards. However, none that I possess.
To apply these settings you will need to log out of your graphical environment and back in again. Or you may prefer to reboot.

More Information

Disclaimer

We test this stuff on our own machines, really we do. But you may run into problems, if you do, come to #fedora on irc.freenode.net

Added Reading

http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA

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