Quake III Arena: slow startup

[chris_i386]

Hi,
I installed the Linux port of Quake III Arena, everything went fine, but now I have the following problem:
After each reboot, the game takes abot one minute to load. The second time it loads very fast, but when I exit the game, the Quake sign follows the mouse for about 20 seconds.
If I switch to console during the initial Quake load, I can see this message just the moment I can hear the intro starting to play:
NVRM: AGPGART:
allocated 256 pages
I think this is what I want, but it shouldn't take one minute!
If I type ps -e | grep quake3
during the first minute, it shows me two processes, both with zero cpu time. (quake3 and quake*x86*)

My system:
Athlon 1.2, 512 DDR ram
geForce 2 MX 400 --> nvidia drivers installed
Debian 3.0 whith custom 2.4.18 kernel

I've searched the web as well as this forum, but didn't find anything related to my exact problem.

Any suggestions? Thanks Chris.

[Icarus]

It takes me about 3 seconds to start Quake3....so this is bad ;)
That AGPGART tells me the nVidia drivers might not be configured well...check your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and check these tips from the nVidia readme...

The following driver options are supported by the NVIDIA XFree86 driver:

Option "NvAGP" "integer"
Configure AGP support. Integer argument can be one of:
0 : disable agp
1 : use NVIDIA's internal AGP support, if possible
2 : use AGPGART, if possible
3 : use any agp support (try AGPGART, then NVIDIA's AGP)
Please note that NVIDIA's internal AGP support cannot
work if AGPGART is either statically compiled into your
kernel or is built as a module, but loaded into your
kernel (some distributions load AGPGART into the kernel
at boot up). Default: 3 (the default was 1 until after
1.0-1251).


and


There are several choices for configuring the NVdriver kernel module's
use of AGP: you can choose to either use NVIDIA's AGP module (NVAGP),
or the AGP module that comes with the linux kernel (AGPGART). This is
controlled through the "NvAGP" option in your XF86Config file:

Option "NvAgp" "0" ... disables AGP support
Option "NvAgp" "1" ... use NVAGP, if possible
Option "NvAgp" "2" ... use AGPGART, if possible
Option "NvAGP" "3" ... try AGPGART; if that fails, try NVAGP

The default is 3 (the default was 1 until after 1.0-1251).

[chris_i386]

Thanks for this wealth of information, unfortunately it didn't help.

Here is what I did so far:

I used the NvAgp 1 option, and it didn't help. I looked at /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status and it said:
Driver AGPGART (inactive)
This was of course because I had AGPGART linked into my kernel. So I recompiled it w/o AGPGART support.
This time /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status said:
Driver NVIDIA.
Thats fine, but quake still needs about one minute for the initial start.
Apart from that I'm now getting the following errormessage at the moment the intro starts:
mtrr: no MTRR for e8000000, 2000000 found.
I recompiled my kernel without MTRR support, no errormessages anymore, but the quake startup problem remains.
Just for fun I tried passing mem=nopentium to the kernel, but of course this didn't help.
I haven't yet tried to totally disable AGP, but without AGP there is no point in playing Quake, right?
I also didn't disable Fast Write again, which I enabled in the nvidia source, because it didn't make any difference with the AGPGART driver. So I _GUESS_ it is also not related.

Any more ideas?
Otherwise I'll just leave it alone...

Thanks for your help!

[chris_i386]

Did a little google, and found a sample XF86Config-4 which had these additional lines:
BusID "1:0:0"
Screen "0"

And, guess what, it didn't help :(