Do I have hardware accelerated graphics?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I’m testing 13.1 on a spare partition. I have an Nvidia card (“G96 [GeForce 9500 GT]”), and although
nouveau runs fine (I have been using it solely for two years, I think), I wanted to load the
proprietary driver and try some games. I have so far tried “supertuxcart”, “extreme-tuxracer”,
“Freedoom”… all namely 3D games.

I also downloaded “Vega Strike”. Considering my ADSL connection is 1 MB/s, it took hours to download
all those things! Thus I was dying to try them out.

But “Vega Strike” does not run:

+++̣̣̣̣̣·······················
Your system currently is not capable of hardware accelerated 3D. Therefore vegastrike cannot run.

Usually the cause of this error is that there are no Free Software drivers for your graphics card,
please contact your graphics card manufacturer and kindly ask them to provide Free Software support
for your card.
̣̣̣̣̣·······················+±

What? But if I have the proprietary driver installed? What else do I need?

nvidia-settings says I have it.

…]

Wait. I thought of finding out if running “vegastrike” from a terminal would post some error, but…
the game does run.

I don’t understand.

Mmmm… it appears the menu entry runs “/usr/bin/vegastrike-wrapper.sh” instead. This contains:


#!/bin/sh

.. /usr/share/opengl-games-utils/opengl-game-functions.sh

checkDriOK vegastrike

VSDATADIR=/usr/share/vegastrike
VERSION=`head -1 $VSDATADIR/Version.txt`

mkdir -p $HOME/$VERSION
cd $HOME/$VERSION
if  \! -e ~/$VERSION/setup.config ]; then
cp $VSDATADIR/setup.config .
fi
if  \! -e ~/$VERSION/vegastrike.config ]; then
cp $VSDATADIR/vegastrike.config .
vssetup
fi
vegastrike "$@" || vssetup > /tmp/vslog 2>&1

The included “opengl-game-functions.sh” contains:


# check if DRI is available, show an error and exit if it isn't
function checkDriOK ()
{
if  `glxinfo | grep "direct rendering: " | head -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 3` != Yes ]; then
zenity --error --text="Your system currently is not capable of hardware \
accelerated 3D. Therefore $1 cannot run.

Usually the cause of this error is that there are no Free Software drivers \
for your graphics card, please contact your graphics card manufacturer and \
kindly ask them to provide Free Software support for your card."
exit 1;
fi
}

Thus, it is ‘glxinfo’ which fails. Indeed:


cer@Elessar:~> glxinfo | grep "direct rendering: "
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
cer@Elessar:~>

Do I have a problem, or is glxinfo broken?

(I’ll comment out the test in order to run the game, but I’d also like to learn what is wrong)

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))

2

Is your user member of the video group, if not the proprietary driver
fails to have access to get direct rendering support (a known bug which
happened in early 12.3 and reappeared in 13.1).

–
PC: oS 13.1 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.11 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 13.1 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.11 | HD 3000
HTPC: oS 13.1 x86_64 | Celeron@1.8GHz | 2GB | Gnome 3.10 | HD 2500

3

On 2013-12-22 02:54, Martin Helm wrote:
> Is your user member of the video group, if not the proprietary driver
> fails to have access to get direct rendering support (a known bug which
> happened in early 12.3 and reappeared in 13.1).

Surprise. That was it… :-o

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))

4

On 2013-12-22 05:20, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2013-12-22 02:54, Martin Helm wrote:
>> Is your user member of the video group, if not the proprietary driver
>> fails to have access to get direct rendering support (a known bug which
>> happened in early 12.3 and reappeared in 13.1).
>
> Surprise. That was it… :-o

There is something I don’t understand.

Some people that need this group added get very bad performance, or the driver does not work at all.
In my case the only thing I noticed is that one test failed, but 3D games were working apparently
fine. At least, I can not “see” the difference.

How come?

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))

5

Am 22.12.2013 14:17, schrieb Carlos E. R.:
> There is something I don’t understand.
>
> Some people that need this group added get very bad performance, or the
> driver does not work at all. In my case the only thing I noticed is that
> one test failed, but 3D games were working apparently fine. At least, I
> can not “see” the difference.
>
Without details I can only guess that something else in their
installation of the nvidia driver is wrong which only shows up when it
starts to run with all bells and whistles and full access to the devices
the driver needs.
I have several machines here with different types of nvidia cards and
none has a problem when the users are member of the video group.

–
PC: oS 13.1 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.11 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 13.1 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.11 | HD 3000
HTPC: oS 13.1 x86_64 | Celeron@1.8GHz | 2GB | Gnome 3.10 | HD 2500

6

Same here, and I’m talking 20+ machines, some of them using the kmp package, most of them using my own dkms-nvidia package. I too suspect / guess something else is going on. Often I notice that when people with issues re. nvidia post here, they have already been “trying”. Next our support doesn’t bring the desired results, a reinstall and all works as it should. This is impossible if nothing relevant happened in between the previous install and the start of our support attempts. It would be very sad if two consecutive default installs on the same hardware would have different results.

Another thing: in case of experimenting for optimal results, always remove the traces of previous attempts. I.e. uninstall nvidia packages/blobs before trying other versions.

7

On 2013-12-22 16:06, Knurpht wrote:

In my case I did nothing, just install the driver the easy way. Just add the repo from the community
list of repos, run yast package manager, reboot. And it worked. It has been the easiest thing ever.
I just noticed that something was wrong when the test of the vegastrike game complained - but the
game actually did run fine.

And adding the user to the video group was something I knew, but just had forgotten, and I did not
associate to the “symptom”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))