Nvidia Card Tweaks For Better MythTV and UI Performance

From LinuxMCE wiki

Using nvidia-settings to get better graphics performance

This was done using LMCE 7.10 beta3. This requires you have an Nvidia based GPU, either on-board or a card.

I noticed that while watching LiveTV using MythTV hooked up to a Dish Network 522 DVR and a Hauppagge PVR 150 MCE card, that xorg was taking up almost all of the available CPU during playback. This resulted in very poor and stuttering performance, as X was hogging all of the CPU. Going back to my days with KnoppMyth we used to have issues with HD content playback, or viewing. To resolve this High X usage, we used nvidia-settings to disable "Sync to VBlank" This made a drastic performance increase, and allowed X to better manage the nvidia cards.

This is how to set that up in LMCE. All of the following commands are done as root, or as sudo user.

Go to the kde desktop via the option on the LMCE menu system. Once there use K Menu > System > Konsole to get up a terminal window, in that window do the following:

sudo -i
nvidia-settings

By changing to user root, you are put into root's home directory, and then the settings you are about to change will be saved there. This is important as all things run as user root in LMCE. You will be presented with Nvidia's control application:

Once in there, select the menu option "X Server XVideo Settings"

Remove the tick from the "Sync to VBlank" box.

This should also automatically take out the tick in the "OpenGL Settings" menu option as well, verify this by checking it out:

After you accomplish these step, simply click "Quit" answer "Yes" and the application should exit. At this point you should be able to go back to LMCE and check the performance.

!!! note for users who require overscan settings: This can also be enabled, and tested in real time here while in the KDE desktop. Simply use the menu option entry for your viewing device, For my Big Screen TV this showed up as "CRT-0". If you need to make these changes, do this before exiting, we can use the same generated config file to load these settings as well!!!

Now that you have exited the program, you should have a file in /root called

.nvidia-settings-rc

This is the file we will load along with lmce_launch_manager.sh on boot, or reboot.

Now it is time to get this file to load persitantly on all reboots, and boots.

Again as user root:

sudo -i
vi /usr/pluto/bin/lmce_launch_manager.sh

You will see a line in there:

KDE_DEBUG=1

Before this line add the line:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only &

This will invoke nvidia-settings to load your newly configured "nvidia-settings-rc"

That is it, you're done. Now go ahead and watch some tv, and from a remote session watch top, you will see your xorg is running at a much lower % of your cpu, and this will help in both SD and HD MythTV watching. It smoothed mine right out.

I also noticed that this definitely helps with UI2 blended and UI2 masked for much smoother transitions, and speed of navigation.

Please feel free to edit this page and correct any mistakes I may have made.