nvidia X driver and OpenGL performance problem

[Hans Nieser]

Hans Nieser wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Recently I've been trying out games such as the Doom 3 demo (Linux 
> binaries), Quake 2, Quake 3 Demo (Linux binaries) and the new Quake 4 
> port (also Linux binaries) under FreeBSD, and although they run without 
> any errors or visual oddities, the performance has been somewhat 
> dissappointing - they all run about 3 to 4 times slower than they do on 
> Windows and are hardly playable (except for Quake 3 / 2, but those 
> obviously require much less of the video hardware). This seems to be the 
> case with all OpenGL games / apps. glxgears with its default settings 
> (that is, I just typed 'glxgears' with no options) renders about 7200 
> FPS on average.

Well here's an interesting twist; when I log into X/Gnome as root, the 
games run a heck of a lot smoother (note that su/sudo doesn't have the 
same effect, I really have to login as root). Quake 4 went from 10-20 fps 
in the first level to 40-50 fps on average.

I'm guesssing however that playing games as root (online games, that is) 
might not be a good idea. Now I just need to figure out what exactly makes 
games run slower for non-root users.