Enabling Compiz with NVidia Drivers

The Compiz desktop effects released with centos5 give you that nice bubbly interface folks like so much, but if you want to use them with the proprietary NVidia drivers, so that you can take advantage of 3D rendering, acceleration, or other nifty features, you'll find that you must modify your xorg.conf file to get the full effect.

To use Compiz with the nvidia drivers, verify the existance of, or add the following lines to your /etc/xorg.conf

Section “Module”
Load           “glx”
Load     “extmod”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier     “Videocard0″
Driver         “nvidia”
Option      “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Option  “DisableGLXRootClipping” “True”
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Group        0
Mode         0666
EndSection 

• Thanks to FabianArrotin for this contribution

Enabling Compiz with Radeon RV250

On my Thinkpad T41 with a resolution of 1400x1050, not the whole screen was being used and a lot of widgets simply didn't show correctly. The 3D features seemed to work but it was simply unusable.

After only adding the file /etc/drirc with the following content:

<option name="allow_large_textures" value="2" />

it worked perfectly. If you have another Radeon card on a different laptop, try this first.

• Thanks to TimVerhoeven for this contribution

Improving Compiz on an onboard nvidia video card

On another system with an onboard graphics nvidia card, Compiz performed very badly and video playback would not work. In this particular case there was a BIOS option called Frame buffer memory that was set to 32MB. Increasing this to 128MB made Compiz very snappy and video playback worked as a charm.