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RogerD
October 27th, 2011, 05:01 PM
Hi

Can anyone tell me what sort of graphics performance is required to run 11.10 in 3D mode?

I've been experimenting with 11.10 on my spare PC, ordinarily I stick to LTS releases, and have been very happy with 10.04.

My spare PC has an Athlon 64 3200+, with 1GB of memory and GeForce 6200 LE/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW! graphics. I've installed the Nvidia drivers, and it does run in 3D, but the windowing performance is terrible - windows take a perceptible time to move across the screen and re-size. Starting in 2D mode solves this problem.

Incidentally, I've noticed a couple of other quirks with 11.10:

1. In 2D mode, the workspaces switcher doesn't work - when I click on the icon in the launcher, only one of the workspaces appears, the other three are just black. Seems to work OK in 3D, but back in 10.04 if you had more than one desktop on the go, the workspace thumbnail, bottom right, actually showed the open applications - a nice feature which seems to be missing with 11.10.

2.When you minimise an open document, it disappears into the parent application icon on the launcher - so if you've more than one document minimised, you can't get at individual documents to re-open them again. Is it me, or is this a major disadvantage.

All help and thoughts welcome.

Roger D

2F4U
October 27th, 2011, 06:14 PM
Maybe this helps:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DemystifyingUnityGraphicsHardwareRequirements

RogerD
October 28th, 2011, 07:49 AM
Many thanks for the response.

I've checked with the suggested links, and it would appear that I should be getting 'excellent' graphics performance. The only way I depart from 'System 5', is that I've got 1G of RAM and not 2G, and that I'm using the Nvidia driver (version 173), which, I understand, should give better performance than 'free nouveau.

I've also run /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p in a terminal, and everything is 'yes'.

Nevertheless, the windowing performance on my system is poor. In particular, windows are slow to re-size.

Could the 1G of RAM be a problem - it's supposed to be 2G - that's what is says on the memory stick, but only 1G seems to be recognised?

Or, am I using the right Nvidia driver? There's a post-release version 173 updates, perhaps that's the one I should be using.

Roger D