NVidia Bitmap Corruption and Beta 180.06 Drivers Report

[Octavian Florea]

On 11/23/2008 01:21 AM, Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> Have been evaluating  the latest nvidia beta drivers (180.06, 64 bit) and they
> seem to have fixed the screen artefacts that plagued KDE 4. I'm not seeing any
> issues with task bar glyph corruption etc.
>
> However :) On my GF6100 I was seeing bad text corruption, particularly with
> Italic text. Apparently its due to the GlyphCache been enabled for the 6&  7
> series of cards for the first time. The fix is to either disable the glyph
> cache:
>
>    nvidia-settings -a GlyphCache=0
>
> Which apparently will impact performance, though I didn't see any difference,
> or Disable sub-pixel hinting in the anti-aliasing settings.
>
> Both worked, I'm quite pleased with the overall results.
>
> The drives can be downloaded here:
>
>    32 Bit
>    http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_180.06.html
>
>    64 Bit
>    http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_180.06.html	
>
>
> Additionally they include VDPAU - NVidia new API for accelerating video
> playback (PurevideHD for linux basically). I've seen very good reviews and
> benchmarks on this, but you need a 8 Series card or better and patches to
> mplayer to use it. No doubt support for this will work its way into xine (and
> hence kaffine), MythTV etc.
>
>    VDPAU
>    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_180_vdpau&num=1
>
>
>    
In addition to GlyphCache=0 I also had to set the InitialPixmapPlacement 
to 0 to get rid of the text corruption. Disabling hinting solved the 
issue, but text then became quite ugly.
The 180.08 version caused my screen to flicker frequently, whereas 
180.06 behaves normally. Both driver version fix the rendering glitches 
experienced so far (taskbar, system tray, gtk-apps, etc).