Hardware screen scaling problems since 14.04 upgrade with Nvidia legacy driver

[Brent Santin]

Hello,

Just upgraded to Lubuntu 32-bit 14.04 from 13.10 on April 18th, 2014.

- System is a P4, 2.8Ghz, 3GB RAM,
- NVidia GeForce 5700LE AGP graphics card with proprietary legacy video drivers manually installed from Nvidia site (VERSION 173.14.39, RELEASE: 2013.12.6 - the latest possible version available for my graphics card).
- Motherboard is ASUS P4P800-E upgraded to the latest BIOS available.

Prior to the upgrade, the arcade emulator MAME, the Commodore 64 emulator VICE, and the Commodore Amiga emulator FS-UAE worked fantastically in full screen scaled mode. No delay, smooth performance. Reasonably low CPU usage for a processor of this vintage.

After the upgrade to 14.04, all full screen modes (1080x1920) in these emulators bring the system to a crawl. Sound from the emulator is broken up, framerates are terrible (like two frames a second), CPU usage is near or past 100%. I suspect other OpenGL software using full-screen scaling would also be affected, but these are the only three pieces of software I have to test with.

I've found that in MAME and VICE, I can work-around this problem but shutting off "hardware scaling". Essentially (I think), this takes my graphics card out of the loop and does the scaling in software/CPU. Scaling down the resolution of the emulation helps too. Frame-rates are better, CPU usage is lower by a factor of 30 to 40%. However, because of these "work around measure" the overall user experience of the emulators is severely impeded.

I also ran glxgears as a test and resized the window from its original small size, a little bigger every five seconds, until it was the full height of the screen (1080 lines) and got the following results:

Code:

brent@Brent-Lubuntu:~$ glxgears
552 frames in 5.0 seconds = 110.342 FPS
593 frames in 5.0 seconds = 118.471 FPS
416 frames in 5.0 seconds = 83.071 FPS
315 frames in 5.0 seconds = 62.810 FPS
287 frames in 5.0 seconds = 57.252 FPS
197 frames in 5.0 seconds = 39.354 FPS
165 frames in 5.0 seconds = 32.789 FPS
130 frames in 5.0 seconds = 25.937 FPS
124 frames in 5.0 seconds = 24.781 FPS
117 frames in 5.0 seconds = 23.274 FPS
XIO: fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0"
      after 25689 requests (25666 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I had originally switched to the Nvidia proprietary driver from Nouveau because of slight artifacts and stuttering in the latter. The proprietary driver mentioned above worked like a dream in 13.10.

MP4 videos played in VLC VideoLAN player still play well, with low CPU usage.

Based on my limited knowledge, this seems to be a problem with the graphics card full-screen scaling to 1080x1920 (desktop & monitor screenmode) under 14.04. Might have to do something with OpenGL?

The system works very well, other than when these emulators try to go into full screen mode.

My Xorg.0.log file shows the following (notice the error lines):

(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so
(II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
(II) NVIDIA dlloader X Driver 173.14.39 Wed Nov 27 15:02:30 PST 2013
(II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs

...

(**) NVIDIA(0): Enabling RENDER acceleration
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the GLX module; please check in
your X
(EE) NVIDIA(0): log file that the GLX module has been loaded in your X
(EE) NVIDIA(0): server, and that the module is the NVIDIA GLX
module. If
(EE) NVIDIA(0): you continue to encounter problems, Please try
(EE) NVIDIA(0): reinstalling the NVIDIA driver.
(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce FX 5700LE (NV36) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)
(--) NVIDIA(0): Memory: 262144 kBytes
(--) NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 04.36.20.35.00
(II) NVIDIA(0): Detected AGP rate: 8X
(--) NVIDIA(0): Interlaced video modes are supported on this GPU
(--) NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s) on GeForce FX 5700LE at
(--) NVIDIA(0): PCI:1:0:0:
(--) NVIDIA(0): Samsung SMBX2240 (CRT-0)
(--) NVIDIA(0): Samsung SMBX2240 (CRT-0): 400.0 MHz maximum pixel clock

It couldn't initialize opengl with Trusty Tahr 14.04.

One way of duplicating this bug (if you are using an NVidia legacy driver and graphics card):

1. Install the latest version of the VICE emulator
2. from terminal type XVIC
3. Under SETTINGS/VIC SETTINGS/ menu, ensure that HARDWARE SCALING is checked
4. start a graphically intensive game (i.e. the GORF cartridge or a shoot-em-up game).
5. Press CTRL-D to engage full-screen mode.
6. CPU usage will be very high compared with HARDWARE SCALING unchecked.