[ILUG] nvidia drivers - results.

[Donncha O Caoimh]

My phone line was down last night so with nothing else to do I decided
to get the drivers from Nvidia that I downloaded the previous night
working on my machine at home. 
First I backed up X as mentioned in the XFree86 4.0 docs and installed
XFree86 4 from tar files. This worked reasonably easily, although there
were a few niggles with getting the resolution right and refresh rates
up to a decent level (nice thing about it is when you run X -probeonly
it'll find out what your monitor is capable of :)))
Once I got that going I installed the Nvidia driver rpm and compiled the
Kernel patch from the tarball. 
Didn't have much success though, Quake 3 would crash out about 2 seconds
into the demo :( A quick look through the filesystem for any remaining
Mesa libraries and running ldconfig, and restarting X fixed that problem
:)

First I tried demo 1 at "normal" graphical settings. This is 640x480,
lightmap, full screen and a few other things. I got a very respectable
and playable 37.4 FPS.
Feeling happy with myself, I upped the settings to "high quality",
800x600, 32 bit colour(not sure if the TNT supports that) etc.. Ran
through the demo and it came out with a very nice 36.1 FPS!

Despite my reservations about the drivers being closed source, and not
using the XFree DRI I'm very impressed by what Nvidia have released.

Donncha.