Hello!
I have found that for nv(4) nVidia driver the acceleration is disabled
by default for historical reasons:
As properly documented on: https://man.openbsd.org/nv.4 the:
Option "AccelMethod" "string"
has default value "XAA".
However XAA was removed several years ago (in XServer 13, current
version is 21). Therefore as we can verify in Xorg.0.log it has same
effect as disabling acceleration entirely:
(II) LoadModule: "xaa"
(WW) Warning, couldn't open module xaa
(EE) NV: Failed to load module "xaa" (module does not exist, 0)
To enable EXA acceleration (the only that is supported in current
X-Window distribution) we can for example create file
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/15-nv-exa.conf with contents:
Section "Device"
Identifier "nv"
Driver "nv"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection
Now again start X-Window and verify that EXA acceleration is enabled -
in such case following messages should appear in Xorg.0.log:
(**) NV(0): Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
...
(II) EXA(0): Offscreen pixmap area of 201320448 bytes
(II) EXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
(II) Solid
(II) Copy
(II) UploadToScreen
I'm now curious if there are enough volunteers that are willing to test
if EXA acceleration helps them noticeably with nVidia performance
(personally I have nVidia GT218 - which is G80 Series).
In case of positive reports we may think of enabling EXA acceleration as
default (just swapping order of items in enum Accel in g80_type.h should
do the trick, because the one that has 0 value is default), but
considering if there are any cases where EXA causes regressions (crashes
or rendering issues).
Best regards
--Henryk Paluch
