Graphics card advice

[simick]

Hi, I wonder if anyone could give me a bit of advice regarding a possible upgrade.

I'm currently running Compiz Fusion on Fedora 7 using Gnome on the following PC:

Athlon 64 X2 4800+
XFX 8400GS 256MB DDR2 graphics card
2GB PC-5300 DDR2 RAM

It's working fine, but some of the animations (mainly the cube and the window minimise/restore) aren't very smooth at all. I would imagine that the weak link in my setup is the graphics card and am considering buying this MSI 8600GT Silent edition 256MB (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/126985) card.

So firstly, would I see a worthwhile improvement? Or is the lag down to something else, or perhaps even some settings?

Also, how simple is the process of changing a graphics card in Fedora (from a software/drivers point of view)?

Thanks,

Simon.

[Deciare]

GeForce 7-series cards, and especially GeForce 8-series cards, seem to perform poorly with Compiz. I came across an interesting theory (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=102616) suggesting that the graphic card may be falling into a power saving state because Compiz doesn't stress it enough to keep it active.

There's an odd workaround that involves running glxinfo every 20 seconds in an infinite loop. It supposedly keeps the 3D renderer running at full power. Perhaps you'd consider trying it?
#!/bin/sh

while /bin/true
do
glxinfo
sleep 20
done
Enter that into a script and run it at startup.

[simick]

Thanks very much for the suggestion. I tried running that script for a while but there was no noticeable difference unfortunately.

I have noticed something though; the main offender is the window minimising animation. I have it set to use the magic lamp animation, which works absolutely fine and smoothly when restoring a window, but not when minimising it. This seems odd to me, since it's essentially doing the same thing either way.

It also seems that the larger a window is, the more sluggish the animations on it are, which is logical I suppose.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this? If so, any suggestions to remedy it?

Thanks.

[some-guy]

try starting compiz with the '--loose-binding' and/or '--no-libgl-fallback' (allows blur and has been known to fix other problems) options e.g.
compiz --replace --loose-binding --no-libgl-fallback ccp
:D