high cpu usage viewing pages that contain .gif images (nvidia driver, opengl and antialiasing settings related)

[sterios prosiniklis]

Jaunty running from a Live cd, nvidia proprietary driver and extra visual effects enabled.
On this page http://www.wdvl.com/Multimedia/Animation/GIF/Examples.html
the cpu usage is almost 100%, when in nvidia xserver settings, the opengl and antialiasing settings
are set to sync to vblank, allow flipping and 16x respectively.
Other combinations of high quality settings, also trigger the same problem.
Problem does not occur when .gif images are filtered with addblock or when nvidia xserver settings are set to default values.
Quantity of .gif images seems not to be relevant, same results in pages with less animations.
Same behavior exists in hardy normal installation, intrepid wubi installation.
This comment https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/125970/comments/78 in a similar bug points to a page, where the .gif image -not animated- if not filtered, creates the same problem in hardy. Intrepid and jaunty are not affected.

[sterios prosiniklis (steriosprosiniklis)]

'Problem does not occur when .gif images are filtered with addblock or when nvidia xserver settings are set to default values"

Also, changing the value of "image.animation_mode" (about:config) in firefox from normal to once solves the problem.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_Tips_:_Animated_Images

It' s definitely an issue triggered by the combination of animated.gif and nvidia xserver settings.

[Kurt Wall (kwall)]

Thanks for the bug report and for helping improve Ubuntu. This sounds more like an issue with the NVIDIA driver than with Firefox. Rather, Firefox is negatively impacted by some shortcoming in the NVIDIA driver. I have changed the affected package accordingly.

Regards,

Kurt

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've posted a new version of the -nvidia driver to our xorg-edgers PPA,
would you mind testing it either on Jaunty or Karmic and see if it
resolves this bug?

Get nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 - 185.18.14 here:

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[sterios prosiniklis (steriosprosiniklis)]

Testing jaunty (Live usb)

Added in Software sources https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa,
enabled nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 - 185.18.14 (system>administration>hardware drivers),
enabled custom visual effects.
In nvidia xserver settings, used the same values off the initial bug report.

Problem persists, in pages with animated gif images.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[sterios prosiniklis (steriosprosiniklis)]

10.04.1
Bug still here, with latest nvidia driver (260.19.21-0ubuntu1~xup~lucid )
from https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates