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Re: [LUG] Ubuntu 13.04 Nvidia screen tearing

 

On 08/05/13 14:23, bad apple wrote:
On 08/05/13 08:50, tom wrote:
In my experience the trouble will be with the bit that say NVidia. I
reported a couple of days ago about my NVidia problems (on ubu 12.04)
which have just cleared. My advice is never ever buy Nvidia - may they
rot in hell.
Tom te tom te tom

Well, this is one of those KDE vs Gnome or Vi vs Emacs sort of holy
wars, and I'm sure we've even touched on it here before, but all the same:

My experience is completely the opposite. For years I've only
recommended Nvidia cards for linux systems, although I've personally
dealt with countless machines that also have either Intel onboard or AMD
discrete cards as well. In 99% of cases on all cards/manufacturers there
aren't any problems beyond the trivially fixable with a quick google.
But when I have had complete lock ups and total failures it has always
been either the old crappy pre-HD Intel onboard chipsets, which were
genuinely broken, or AMD cards. More recently AMD's wretchedly shitty
APUs (the low end crap with integrated on-die Radeon GPUs) and Nvidia's
poorly implemented Optimus chipset (the dynamically switching Intel
HD/discrete Nvidia dual system most common in MacBooks, fixable with the
Bumblebee patches) have caused me way more trouble than getting Linux
working properly 15 years ago on SGI VPro cards and Sun Elite 3Ds.

Whilst I applaud hugely the efforts of the FLOSS hackers on the epic and
thankless task of reverse engineering the non-proprietary AMD/Nvidia
drivers they are worthless to anyone who needs more than casual 2D on a
single small screen, for stuff like basic office work. I need full
accelerated 3D, big multi monitor support, CUDA/OpenCL and all the fancy
stuff, and I need it to work properly, every single day and to survive a
kernel upgrade (DKMS to the rescue).

So, to cut a long story short, I highly recommend that anyone reading
this completely ignores Tom's anecdotal advice and take my (also
completely anecdotal) advice instead: buy Nvidia every time if you want
decent graphics on Linux. The only supporting evidence I can offer is
the fact that I've dealt with many hundreds if not thousands of
different Linux boxes by this time, so I suspect that my sample size is
much bigger than Toms. Of course, if it turns out that he's actually a
graphics card reviewer for Linux Format and has seen millions of
graphics cards we may have to rethink that - caveat emptor.

Regards

I would add that the anecdotal advice comes from problems with all 5 of my Nvidia based machines - every one has given me problems that googling/ubuntu forums has not solved. It could be just ubuntu but then I've not had problems with ubuntu on intel/amd. And I do run the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I've even installed other OS (Suse/RH/Mint) and still had problems. They are, admittedly, mostly low end graphics engines often on motherboards. The only one that functioned well burnt out. I found I could often get improvements by running 'software' acceleration - but alas if I use all 4 cores of this machine it overheats.... that is an ubuntu problem but I dont play games so I'm generally happy if I can just drag a few shapes around. I'm not inclined to shell out for a high performance card given the problems I've experienced with their bog standard product, which used to run fine under windows but screws up even with their proprietary drivers in linux. Not that I've tried windows for 4 years or so on the machines in question.
Tom te tom te tom

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