nVidia GT 520 with 313.18 driver general problems

I recently bought a new card nVidia GT 520 1GB DDR3 as a replacement for my Radeon HD 3650 512 MB DDR3. I’m running Archlinux, linux-ck 3.7.8 64-bit.

I have quite many problems in a lot of different apps:

  1. Desktop environments: KDE - window movement stuttering, frameskip and a bit of tearing even though vsync is enabled. It is not that visible when moving windows around, but mostly on some webpages: webgl car visualizer, angry birds-significant framedrop/frameskip making the game experience awful

-glxgears (here I can see some tearing and frameskip as well. Maybe it’s just the tearing making it look like it lags)

-Libreoffice Impress (I only used it for animation testing - result: no smooth animations at all … wipe left / right - both are laggy (frameskip) and tearing despite vsync. Both full screen presentation and animation preview in window affected, mostly visible if I resize the preview to the size of the desktop)

That’s KDE (KWin - unredirected full screen windows enabled, sync to VBlank enabled). Very similar behavious in Gnome 3.

Games:
First I tried Assaultcube which is running very well, 200 FPS with antialiasing turned off. (vsync was disabled for testing purposes to see what this card can do).

-Alienarena (running very well, no tearing at all, 30 FPS means playable for me)

-Warsow (I get a lot of tearing even though vsync is enabled everywhere)

-Sauerbraten (settings almost maxed out and running pretty well, no noticable tearing / lags)

OK … now the most important part: Steam games :)

-World of Goo, Uplink, Osmos - no tearing, but very slow 2D performance, overlay lags, delay after mouse movement in overlay. Big Picture mode was totally unresponsive in those games. Games running fine but I still notice a slowdown. In World of Goo, I noticed this: when moving around the level, it’s not smooth, but the image returns to a position which it was in before - it looks like a very little shaking, I can say it’s just framedrop and my eyes were misled again :( It’s not smooth thats what Im sure, nor are any other 2D games besides Closure which only has 2 colors so that may be why I didnt notice anything.

-Red Orchestra - running very well but I got some overbright textures recently and the shadows aren’t sharp enough for that old Unreal Engine, I had them looking a bit better. This is more an in-game bug than something wrong with the card.

-Psychonauts - no shadows

-Team Fortress 2 - incredible amount of tearing very similar to Warsow (I love TF2 so I learned how to ignore the tearing), settings are maxed and the gameplay experience is very good despite lags when many enemies are on the screen but after 5 minutes of playing everything gets better. When I open the steam overlay the computer uses to freeze on input for a few seconds (so I dont use overlay at all in this game) and if I want to open a new chat window to send a message to a friend, my compter freezes completely (no tty available, it remained like that for 1 hour so I had to reboot)

-Steam overlay is generally very slow (input delay or something, Big Picture even the mouse cursor is delayed), in wine games run with -opengl command I can’t do anything in the overlay, I only can have a look at it.

Wine games:
-Age of Empires 2 crashes on any other resolution than 1024*768 (I’ve seen this reported somewhere and it is definitely a driver bug)

-World of Warcraft Classic 1.12.1 - weird bug: http://i.imgur.com/QUlxYR8.jpg the visual bug u can see … and the error also doesn’t display in OpenGL mode

-WoW WOTLK 3.3.5a works well

Please help me solve my problems. I don’t know if the drivers are buggy like that or it’s my card. It was very cheap and is meant to be used as a HTPC card but it’s 2013 (the card is from 2011, I bought it just recently) and World of Goo runs on any card without any lag/framedrop/tearing. Any suggestions what I should do ? I can give more info (like terminal output) if needed.

EDIT 1:
I tried to do the same things again with my old card. I can say nVidia is better:

Assaultcube - very weird behavior on ATI card (antialiasing isn’t supported I think). nVidia card drops to 20 FPS with 16xAA, ATI card remains the same FPS on every level of AA. If I turn AA off, ATI card goes 120-150 FPS, nVidia goes above 200 FPS. Not important for me though, I used it to compare the performance.

Bastion, World of Goo - both games are much faster on ATI card, steam overlay is much faster on ATI card. The problem is I get a lot of tearing on ATI card.

Team Fortress 2 - since my ATI card is not supported anymore, the game is unplayable, but the loading is a little bit faster, it doesn’t stuck at all (progress bar moves) and if I open the overlay during the gameplay it doesn’t freeze my PC like it does on nVidia card.

I haven’t done more tests but imo the driver should be fixed for GT 520 … it’s terrible to play 2D games on this card (but it has good enough performance to handle 3D games … )

EDIT 2: Sorry for triple posting, I hope now I found the right forum … how can I remove my old topics?

I could record the long loading time, in-game tearing and also the slow overlay is visible on this vid: - YouTube Same thing happening in full screen and other DEs than KDE. The vid is fast at the end because of bug in screen capture software…