nVidia TNT/GeForce driver for Haiku
Technical information and testing tools:
Here you will find technical documents that might get written about the nVidia driver, design notes, and technical information on how to use the driver.
Rudolf's BWindowScreen tests, tweaks and considerations:
Improved (a lot) in the nVidia driver is the BWindowScreen support. If you want to test with that a bit, or if you are interested in technical information on how to use it for non-standard modes and higher refreshrates, checkout my simple command line testprogram for it. Make sure you have a close look at it's sourcecode and comments in it!
Note please: I have tested this app with the official Be Millenium driver also: as long as you don't use the "TWEAK_METHOD", which is 'deeper' than the tweak applied for the refreshrates done in any case, it works perfectly. (I'm getting a pleasant 70Hz refresh by default ;-)
The TWEAK_METHOD also works, but the positioning of the displayed area seems a bit odd (maybe I'll check that out later on).
Update: Now it's also tested with the Be SIS6326(DVD) driver (Diamand Speedstar A50 (A70)). Both TWEAK_METHOD and 'normal method' are working 100% OK...
Yet another update: Also the official Be driver for G200 and the Be driver for G400 work fully OK, with or without the TWEAK_METHOD.
Dualhead and TVout modes are included now. These functions are not yet supported on nVidia cards though.
Be aware that you will see rubbish on the screen(s), followed by one or two vertical stripes. The app takes about 30 seconds to execute the test! (watch your refresrate change from 60 to 70Hz also BTW)
Download Rudolf's BWindowScreen tests, tweaks and considerations here (including sourcecode): Version 6 (21kb)
Rudolf's virtualscreen tests and considerations:
If you want to play around with (large) virtual workspaces, get my virtualscreen tool here. It's kind of fun playing with it!
For instance:
- If you enable a mode that has a width or height above 10000 pixels, you will see that Be's app_server fails the software rectangle fill command. The rest works though, so you should be able to safely use this mode.
- Open up a (long) sourcefile with the BeIDE: tell it to 'zoom' and have a look at the length of the window. Apparantly BeIDE supports windows upto about 2048 pixels in height...
- Start a movie using hardware overlay, and check you are actually using it because large workspaces leave little room for it sometimes. Now instruct the mediaplayer to use fullscreen mode for example, or start scrolling/panning the screen while leaving the videooutput window alone. The behaviour you see (the overlay window leaving the video behind for example) is why I need to implement the move_overlay() function. UPDATE: finally fixed this now.;
- Setup a virtualscreen with a height of say 33000 pixels (if you have the memory to cope). Now scroll down to the bottom (that will take a while..). See the upper part of the Desktop re-appear? The app-server's X and Y coordinates roll over at 32768. The driver is working correctly: you could setup a height of 65535 pixels if you had enough memory (256Mb anyone?).
Hint:
Use full logging and the command: tail -f nv.accelerant.0.log in a terminal window to see what acceleration hooks are exported by the driver (for instance). Holding down the SHIFT key wile using the up and down arrow keys lets you scroll through the logfile while it's being generated...
Download Rudolf's virtualscreen tool with considerations here (including sourcecode): Version 6 (15kb)
Rudolf.
(Page last updated on February 24, 2005)