This can be caused by a variety of problems, such as PCI IRQ routing errors, I/O APIC problems or conflicts with other devices sharing the IRQ (or their drivers).

If possible, configure your system such that your graphics card does not share its IRQ with other devices (try moving the graphics card to another slot if applicable, unload/disable the driver(s) for the device(s) sharing the card's IRQ, or remove/disable the device(s)).

If X starts but you have trouble with OpenGL, you most likely have a problem with other libraries in the way, or there are stale symlinks. See Appendix C, Installed Components for details.

You should also check that the correct extensions are present;

    % xdpyinfo

should show the “GLX” and “NV-GLX” extensions present. If these two extensions are not present, then there is most likely a problem loading the glx module, or it is unable to implicitly load GLcore. Check your X config file and make sure that you are loading glx (see Chapter 2, Configuring X for the NVIDIA Driver). If your X config file is correct, then check the X log file for warnings/errors pertaining to GLX. Also check that all of the necessary symlinks are in place (refer to Appendix C, Installed Components).

This problem occurs with DDC and "blue line" stereo glasses, that get the stereo signal from one video port of the graphics card. When a X screen does not display any stereo drawable the stereo signal is disabled on the associated video port.

Forcing stereo flipping allows the stereo glasses to shutter continuously. This can be done by enabling the OpenGL control "Force Stereo Flipping" in nvidia-settings, or by setting the X configuration option "ForceStereoFlipping" to "1".

There are two cases where this may occur. If the displays are attached to the same GPU, and one of them is out of sync with the stereo glasses, you will need to reconfigure your monitors to drive identical mode timings; please see Appendix J, Programming Modes for details.

If the displays are attached to different GPUs, the only way to synchronize stereo across the displays is with specialized frame lock hardware, which is only supported on certain Quadro cards. Please see Appendix V, Frame Lock and Genlock for details. This applies to seperate GPUs on seperate cards as well as seperate GPUs on the same card, such as Quadro FX 4500 X2. Note that the Quadro FX 4500 X2 only provides a single DIN connector for stereo, tied to the bottommost GPU. In order to synchronize onboard stereo on the other GPU you must use frame lock hardware.

The X driver will abort with this error message if the NVIDIA kernel module fails to load or the device files aren't present. If you receive this error, you should check the output of dmesg for kernel error messages.

If modinfo reports that the "nvidia" kernel module is loaded, the device files (/dev/nvidiactl, /dev/nvidia0..7, /dev/fbs/nvidia0..7) may be missing.

When in TwinView, the NVIDIA X driver normally provides a Xinerama extension that X clients (such as window managers) can use to to discover the current TwinView configuration. Some window mangers can get confused by this information. Use the following option in the "device" section of the Xorg configuration file to disable this behavior:

  Option "NoTwinViewXineramaInfo" "1"

Changing the default process scheduling class to the real-time class may help concurrent OpenGL applications render smoothly.

To select real-time as the default scheduling class, run dispadmin -d RT as root and reboot. To restore the scheduling class to the system defaults just remove the file /etc/dispadmin.conf.

The graphics card may be newer than the NVIDIA Accelerated Solaris Driver Set, meaning that its pci-id is not included in the installation scripts and not added in the file /etc/driver_aliases. To manually register the graphics card, proceed as follows:

Your stability problems may be AGP-related. See Appendix F, Configuring AGP for details.

The application is probably using a different library still on your system, rather than the NVIDIA supplied OpenGL library. Please see Appendix C, Installed Components for details.

Quake2 requires some minor setup to get it going. First, in the Quake2 directory, the install creates a symlink called libGL.so that points at libMesaGL.so. This symlink should be removed or renamed. Second, in order to run Quake2 in OpenGL mode, you must type

    % quake2 +set vid_ref glx +set gl_driver libGL.so

Quake2 does not seem to support any kind of full-screen mode, but you can run your X server at the same resolution as Quake2 to emulate full-screen mode.

Integrated graphics have more strict memory bandwidth limitations that limit the resolution and refresh rate of the modes you request. To work around this, you can reduce the maximum refresh rate by lowering the upper value of the VertRefresh range in the Monitor section of your X config file. Though not recommended, you can disable the memory bandwidth test with the NoBandWidthTest X config file option.

Most of the startx delay problems we have found are caused by incorrect data in video BIOSes about what display devices are possibly connected or what i2c port should be used for detection. You can work around these problems with the X config option IgnoreDisplayDevices (please see the description in Appendix D, X Config Options).

Incorrectly sized fonts are generally caused by incorrect DPI (Dots Per Inch) information. You can check what X thinks the physical size of your monitor is, by running:

 % xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

This will report the size in pixels, and in millimeters.

If these numbers are wrong, you can correct them by modifying the X server's DPI setting. See Appendix W, Dots Per Inch for details.

There are some known timing and signal integrity issues on ALi chipsets. The following tips may help stabilize problematic ALI systems: