Miserable 2d performance on what should be fast hardware

[Josh Paetzel]

I have a reasonable fast machine, dual core 2.2ghz opteron, 2 gigs of
DDR, sata disks, and a pair of nvidia cards, one a 7xxx pci-e 16x and
the other a 55xx PCI card.  I have 3 monitors, so one of the cards
needs to run dual-head, which requires the nvidia drivers....the xorg
nv driver can't do dual-head.

My problem is that 2d acceleration is either not working or really
really broken....if I'm ssh'd into a remote box and doing a compile
just rendering the text in an xterm uses 100% of a cpu.  Doing two
compiles at once maxes both cpus, and any more than that makes
keyboard input laggy.  I've tried various terms, xfce's Terminal,
xterms, eterms, aterm...I've tried various window managers including
xfce4, fluxbox, and KDE, all to no avail.  I've also tried xorg 7.2,
which didn't make any difference either.

As a side note, the problem seems to be related to the second video
card, as I didn't have any trouble before I added it.  There aren't
IRQ conflicts, nor does there appear to be a massive number of
interrupts going on, the cpu usage is 'system' and systat -vm doesn't
show a lot of interrupts on any of the irq lines.

It's also worth noting that 3d accel seems to be broken with the
addition of the second card, and also mixing the nv and nvidia driver
doesn't work out so well (kernel panics), I only need dual-head on one
card.  Not that I actually care, unless 3d accel could help solve my
issue, I don't need it for anything.

I do have an ati pci-e 16x card I can swap for the nvidia, my problem
there was an inability to get a working dual-head config for it...I'm
open to example xorg.confs there.  The other factor that makes this
less than desirable is it effectively pins media to the card it was
started on.....dragging a running video from a monitor on one card to
a monitor on the other causes the video to go black.

Suggestions or feats of magic welcome, including reports of 'I have
triple-head working on such and such a card'  I'll gladly buy hardware
to fix the problem.


-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel