Embarrassing window movement with nVidia card under Gnome 3

For a graphics card I have a nVidia GeForce GTX 660Ti. It's not hot shit new by any means but it normally does well for what I need it to. For my operating system I run Fedora 22 Linux with the Gnome 3 desktop (version 3.16.2 actually). So far nothing special, lots of people use nVidia graphic cards and lots of people use Fedora Linux. But for me this combo is downright embarrassing.

For the record I'll say games run great, emulators run great, videos play great, just about everything is great... except for the what seems to be trivial task of window movement. Window movement on my system is a gosh darned disgrace. Be it a small Gnome Terminal window or a big Google Chrome window the movement is horribly choppy. It is so choppy it makes my system as a whole look like a total slug, not the kind of thing you want to show off to your friends. This makes me so very sad. Sans video card I upgraded my entire system in March 2015. I would like to think a new system wouldn't have trouble doing something as basic as moving a window smoothly. But it does :(

OK, enough whining and complaining. I'm done bitching.

I set out to find what was wrong with my system, be it hardware or software, which leads to it's dismal desktop graphics performance. About the only thing I found was an unanswered post on devtalk.nvidia.com and a thread on reddit about the exact problem I am having. Both were fairly current, from August 2015. I set out to dive into the reddit post so I could extract what knowledge was there. It turns out (kinda) to be a card clocking issue, where as on the desktop the card is running at it's lowest speed. I suppose this makes it impossible to get smooth window movement.

As a stopgap reddit user MAH0 posted a few lines of text to add to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-nvidia.conf file. Normally I wouldn't go about adding configuration options to my system because some dude said it would work. But after checking out MAH0's reddit overview page I was pretty confident they knew their Linux shit.

And as if a gift from the heavens the few configuration options worked as it seemed they should. My window movement was quite a bit smoother and snappy. The reddit thread can be found here and is also referenced a couple of paragraphs above.

As far as I can tell there isn't any undesirable side effects thus far. The card does run warmer as the clock speed is always set to 'Performance'. This can have an adverse effect on your video card in the long run. But as of right now I'm finally pleased.

A little ditty about XBOXDRV on Fedora 22

I recently stopped using the xpad kernel module in favor of the userspace xboxdrv driver for my gamepads under Fedora 22. Once switching the only issue at hand was starting xboxdev via the service command and starting it at boot time (so I didnt have to start it via the service command). A little Google-Fu (of stuff I should already know) resulted in the easy commands to get what I wanted.

To start xboxdrv via the service command (in case you don't want xboxdrv starting at boot time) type the following into a terminal

sudo service xboxdrv start

To start xboxdrv at boot time use the command

sudo systemctl enable xboxdrv.service

and that's all I did. It seems to work fine for my needs.

Dolphin-Emu for Fedora 22 rpm updated to 4.0-git-4763

I updated the rpm package of the excellent Nintendo Gamecube / Wii / Triforce emulator to version 4.0-git-4763 (current as of 08-28-2015). The rpm is built for Fedora 22 64bit.

You can download the rpm package from my Google Drive by clicking here.

Fedora 22 and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Installation

Hot and steamy! Straight from the Install-Instructions in the OBS WIKI. I guess it looks like no more compiling from source is needed (unless you just want to, of course).

Fedora 22 installation

FFmpeg is required. If you do not have the FFmpeg installed (if you're not sure, then you probably don't have it), you can get it from the rpmfusion repos with the following commands: 

sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-22.noarch.rpm

Then you can install OBS with the following commands (This pulls all dependencies, including ffmpeg): 

sudo sudo rpm --import http://repo.tech-3.net/Fedora/TECH3-GPG-KEY.public 

sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/tech-3.repo http://repo.tech-3.net/Fedora/tech-3.repo 

sudo dnf update && sudo dnf install obs-studio