Games run slowly in Arch Linux

Hi guys,

I was going to post this at the main Arch forums, but figured I might try here first.

I've gotten Arch installed, KDE4 is running beautifully. I also have the latest Nvidia drivers installed via pacman. They seem to be working. Unfortunately the games I have tried all run slowly. And I am referring to native games.

I am on the laptop in my sig, P151HM1 with a 560m

Nexuiz runs pretty slowly. I turned all the graphics up @ 1920x1080. I would think that this shouldn't really stress the laptop out too much, but it's running slowly.

Same goes for Warsow, actually it is slightly worse. Sound is kind of garbled as well.

vDrift refused to run. I guess I should try to start that in terminal and see what the problem is.

Just thought someone might have had the same problem though. I've done some googling but haven't found anything quite related yet.

 

Are you sure that the nvidia drivers are actually working?

I'm guessing your card features Optimus which is a hybrid system where the idea is that it, in windows, it switches back and forth between the discrete nvidia card and a lower-powered intel card in order to save on battery and heat output.

Optimus is not yet supported in Linux and will not be for some time from what I've read. The problem is that Linux powers the nvidia card, sucking energy, but only uses the intel card for actual graphics acceleration.

This at least would explain why your desktop runs just fine but 3d games are sluggish because it's basically only using the secondary intel card rather than the nvidia card.

If this is the case, there are some strategies out there to cope with this. One of them would involve going into the bios settings and enabling the nvidia card exclusively and reinstalling the nvidia drivers.

There are 3rd party projects like bumblebee and ironhide that are trying to create a workable solution until nvidia and the linux kernel learn to play nicely again.

 

Actually, Optimus isn't used with this particular laptop, so I don't think that's the problem.

I suppose there is a chance that the drivers aren't configured correctly though. How else would I be able to check this? the Nvidia program starts without a problem, and everything looks fine.

 

I once had the wrong drivers installed for my 9600m and I think it damaged it to some extent so be careful!

The problem is that I don't know how arch packages drivers so you might want to head over to their forums and ask them directly.

 

Sounds good, thanks for the help v1k1ng1001

 

There are two quick ways to check what driver you're using:

1) Type 'dmesg | grep -i nvidia' at the command line (without the quotes). Check the output for something that reads like the following:

NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 280.13

2) Type 'cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep nvidia' and check the output for a line that reads 'driver nvidia'.

If (1) doesn't show up, then you need to download the Linux driver from the NVIDIA website. If (2) doesn't show up, while installing the driver, make sure you select 'yes' when it asks to modify your xorg.conf.

You might have to blacklist some modules in order for the closed-source NVIDIA driver to work (i.e. nouveau and anything that has to do with XFree86 DRI).

 

Thanks for the help hf2046.

The first output looks good, and the 2nd one shows up correctly as well, looks like this:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 280.13 ([email protected]) Wed Jul 27 17:15:58 PDT 2011
Driver "nvidia"

I have a feeling though it's like you said, I need to blacklist the nouveau drivers. I believe I installed them before the Nvidia ones at the counsel of the Beginners guide. Not sure why it was a suggestion. I'm off to google blacklisting drivers now!

Edit: Well, I decided to just uninstall the Nouveau drivers. Nexuiz seems to work, but Warsow still is giving troubles. I'll google it some some

 

The proper way to install Arch is like this with xorg:

Pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

If you installed nouveau, you can remove it and force it to use nvidia:

pacman -Rns xf86-video-nouveau

This will make the nvidia driver the only on your system

Note: The guide says to install nouveau first before nvidia, this is not necessarily and I have never done it this way.

 

Thanks corbintechboy. I did get Warsow working last night. I uninstalled the nouveau drivers, but that didn't help. There is a setting in Warsow, sleep state between frames or something. Not sure why that isn't checked by default, but it solved my problem.

So I think everything is working well now. Thanks for the help everyone!