[Lilug] Recommend nvidia card

[Chris Knadle]

On Sat, February 7, 2009 1:26 pm, Kenneth Downs wrote:
> i'm looking for the cheapest nvidia card that will be very happy with
> Ubuntu and the fancy desktop nonsense^H^H^H^H^H effects.
>
> This would go into an existing machine as a 2nd card.
>
> I know Nvidia plays nice with Linux, but this is not for gaming, and I
> don't want to spend $200.00.  But I'm nervous to go low end and find it
> does not support the effects.
>
> Any recommendations?

Actually, I'd be very surprised if I heard that even the lowest end Nvidia
card didn't support all of the compiz effects.  The main thing I'd look
for would be a video card that didn't require a fan [silence is a great
thing] and just double-check that it supported OpenGL.  The compiz effects
aren't very taxing as video effects go -- the "better" video cards do fast
texture rendering and have good built-in pixel shaders, but I think none
of those things are needed for what you're looking to do.  An Intel card
should be fine too.  An ATi card would also work, but I'd make sure that
it had an open source ATi driver, which is important because the older ATi
cards went out of support for 3D drivers and became a relatively unhappy
situation.

IMHO the main thing 3D gets you is the ability to play 3D games.  A lot of
people enjoy playing with Compiz Fusion because the effects are pretty,
but I likewise tried it, played with it, and found it wasn't for me --
tended needlessly distract me more than help me.

Nvidia cards do have good Linux support, but things have gotten more
complicated -- the driver now occasionally splits into "old" and "new"
drivers, and the old drivers have to be hacked by other people in order to
get them to work with newer kernels.  If you build your own kernels, you
also have to taint the kernel with a open-source but proprietary driver
that has to be built for each version of the kernel you install.  There
are also other driver installation methods, but the other methods tend not
to use package management, or deactivate the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers when
installing new ones, leading to confusion (the 'envyng' method).  Oh,
yeah, and avoid Nvidia G84 and G86 chips, because they have manufacture
defects that cause failure due to heat because internal portions of the
chip don't get cooled properly.  There's a good wikipedia page that
explains which cards have those chips in them.

And oh by-the-way, the Nvidia kernel driver is larger than the entire
Linux kernel itself.  The Nvidia driver I have loaded right now is about 7
MB.  Not a big deal because memory sizes are comparatively large today,
but it's also not as memory efficient as it could be, and slowly grows
until a new driver set is started.

So there are benefits and drawbacks when it comes to performance vs
openness and support.

  -- Chris

--

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us