[plug] NVidia drivers and RENDER acceleration

[Craig Ringer]

> Explains why a gnome-terminal session takes so long to start up.

Perhaps. I suspect that's more to do with the amount of extraneous crap 
GNOME-terminal is linked into, though. Try timing a C compile job under 
GNOME-terminal, then under xterm, though - you'll be horrified at the 
difference the display of the make output makes. I'm yet to try with and 
without RenderAccel but I suspect gnome-terminal will be a /lot/ closer 
to xterm when accelerated RENDER is enabled.

Now, if only the free XFree86 drivers (ANY of them) supported 
accelerated RENDER. I hear the sis driver might soon, and mga kind of 
does, but it's not really a good situation right now. I fear the chances 
of the s3 driver getting accelerated RENDER are about nil, and I could 
/really/ use that. Hmm... maybe finding someone willing to take a bit of 
money to implement it might be possible.

Anyway, this render acceleration finially makes mozilla behave like less 
of a slug, which by it's self is a really pleasant change.

> On a slightly different tangent I was running the xfree nv drivers for a
> while and it used to take a good couple of seconds to switch from X to a
> virtual console. It really annoyed me at first because it took so
> appallingly long but I didn't have the time to stuff around with trying
> to get the nvida drivers working. When I finally did get around to it I
> was amazed at how quick the change happened and how I had become
> accustomed to the change.

Interesting. It still takes at least a full second for my system to 
switch from X to a VC, and at least 1/2 a second to switch back. OTOH, 
at least when switching back that appears to be almost entirely my 
monitor re-syncing to the new mode. That'd be one of the nicer things 
about LCDs - no long re-sync blanking.

Craig Ringer

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