Known Issues

Notebooks

If you are using a notebook see the "Known Notebook Issues" in Chapter 15, Configuring a Notebook.

Texture seams in Quake 3 engine

Many games based on the Quake 3 engine set their textures to use the GL_CLAMP clamping mode when they should be using GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE. This was an oversight made by the developers because some legacy NVIDIA GPUs treat the two modes as equivalent. The result is seams at the edges of textures in these games. To mitigate this, older versions of the NVIDIA display driver remap GL_CLAMP to GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE internally to emulate the behavior of the older GPUs, but this workaround has been disabled by default. To re-enable it, uncheck the "Use Conformant Texture Clamping" checkbox in nvidia-settings before starting any affected applications.

FSAA

When FSAA is enabled (the __GL_FSAA_MODE environment variable is set to a value that enables FSAA and a multisample visual is chosen), the rendering may be corrupted when resizing the window.

libGL DSO finalizer and pthreads

When a multithreaded OpenGL application exits, it is possible for libGL's DSO finalizer (also known as the destructor, or "_fini") to be called while other threads are executing OpenGL code. The finalizer needs to free resources allocated by libGL. This can cause problems for threads that are still using these resources. Setting the environment variable "__GL_NO_DSO_FINALIZER" to "1" will work around this problem by forcing libGL's finalizer to leave its resources in place. These resources will still be reclaimed by the operating system when the process exits. Note that the finalizer is also executed as part of dlclose(3), so if you have an application that dlopens(3) and dlcloses(3) libGL repeatedly, "__GL_NO_DSO_FINALIZER" will cause libGL to leak resources until the process exits. Using this option can improve stability in some multithreaded applications, including Java3D applications.

Thread cancellation

Canceling a thread (see pthread_cancel(3)) while it is executing in the OpenGL driver causes undefined behavior. For applications that wish to use thread cancellation, it is recommended that threads disable cancellation using pthread_setcancelstate(3) while executing OpenGL or GLX commands.

Problems that Will Not Be Fixed

NV-CONTROL versions 1.8 and 1.9

Version 1.8 of the NV-CONTROL X Extension introduced target types for setting and querying attributes as well as receiving event notification on targets. Targets are objects like X Screens, GPUs and Quadro Sync devices. Previously, all attributes were described relative to an X Screen. These new bits of information (target type and target id) were packed in a non-compatible way in the protocol stream such that addressing X Screen 1 or higher would generate an X protocol error when mixing NV-CONTROL client and server versions.

This packing problem has been fixed in the NV-CONTROL 1.10 protocol, making it possible for the older (1.7 and prior) clients to communicate with NV-CONTROL 1.10 servers. Furthermore, the NV-CONTROL 1.10 client library has been updated to accommodate the target protocol packing bug when communicating with a 1.8 or 1.9 NV-CONTROL server. This means that the NV-CONTROL 1.10 client library should be able to communicate with any version of the NV-CONTROL server.

NVIDIA recommends that NV-CONTROL client applications relink with version 1.10 or later of the NV-CONTROL client library (libXNVCtrl.a, in the nvidia-settings-550.135.tar.bz2 tarball). The version of the client library can be determined by checking the NV_CONTROL_MAJOR and NV_CONTROL_MINOR definitions in the accompanying nv_control.h.

The only web released NVIDIA SunOS driver that is affected by this problem (i.e., the only driver to use either version 1.8 or 1.9 of the NV-CONTROL X extension) is 1.0-8756.

CPU throttling reducing memory bandwidth on IGP systems

For some models of CPU, the CPU throttling technology may affect not only CPU core frequency, but also memory frequency/bandwidth. On systems using integrated graphics, any reduction in memory bandwidth will affect the GPU as well as the CPU. This can negatively affect applications that use significant memory bandwidth, such as video decoding using VDPAU, or certain OpenGL operations. This may cause such applications to run with lower performance than desired.

To work around this problem, NVIDIA recommends configuring your CPU throttling implementation to avoid reducing memory bandwidth. This may be as simple as setting a certain minimum frequency for the CPU.

Depending on your operating system and/or distribution, this may be as simple as writing to a configuration file in the /sys or /proc filesystems, or other system configuration file. Please read, or search the Internet for, documentation regarding CPU throttling on your operating system.

VDPAU initialization failures on supported GPUs

If VDPAU gives the VDP_STATUS_NO_IMPLEMENTATION error message on a GPU which was labeled or specified as supporting PureVideo or PureVideo HD, one possible reason is a hardware defect. After ruling out any other software problems, NVIDIA recommends returning the GPU to the manufacturer for a replacement.

Some applications, such as Quake 3, crash after querying the OpenGL extension string

Some applications have bugs that are triggered when the extension string is longer than a certain size. As more features are added to the driver, the length of this string increases and can trigger these sorts of bugs.

You can limit the extensions listed in the OpenGL extension string to the ones that appeared in a particular version of the driver by setting the __GL_ExtensionStringVersion environment variable to a particular version number. For example,

__GL_ExtensionStringVersion=17700 quake3

will run Quake 3 with the extension string that appeared in the 177.* driver series. Limiting the size of the extension string can work around this sort of application bug.

gnome-shell doesn't update until a window is moved

Versions of libcogl prior to 1.10.x have a bug which causes glBlitFramebuffer() calls used to update the window to be clipped by a 0x0 scissor (see GNOME bug #690451 for more details). To work around this bug, the scissor test can be disabled by setting the __GL_ConformantBlitFramebufferScissor environment variable to 0. Note this version of the NVIDIA driver comes with an application profile which automatically disables this test if libcogl is detected in the process.

Some X servers ignore the RandR transform filter during a modeset request

The RandR layer of the X server attempts to ignore redundant RRSetCrtcConfig requests. If the only property changed by an RRSetCrtcConfig request is the transform filter, some X servers will ignore the request as redundant. This can be worked around by also changing other properties, such as the mode, transformation matrix, etc.