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Re: [LUG] NVidia

 

On 29/10/2018 16:33, Ian Dickinson wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 16:00, Neil <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Looking at recent emails on the list, and some from the past, I get the
>> impression that, on Linux, nVidia graphics are more trouble than they
>> are worth. Am I right in thinking that the best way is to avoid nVidia
>> altogether on Linux?
>>
>> Since I don't play computer games nor do clever things with photos, I
>> just ignore nVidia altogether. Is that a sensible way to go?
> 
> I don't play games either, but I do want to use the graphics card's
> GPU for number crunching (no, not crypto mining - machine learning).
> Afaik - I'm still getting my feet wet with the ML packages - the
> support for driving the NVidia GPUs as compute farms is better than
> for the other chipsets. Hence my aim to conquer the mountain of
> getting the proprietary drivers working with my 'buntu.

I'm afraid you're in for some bad news - you don't want the package you 
just installed for testing Nvidia GPU number crunching stuff. That's an 
entirely different world of pain. You need the CUDA subsystem (which 
will preclude you from doing graphics out whilst the 1050 is in 
'compute' mode - you'll have to run the Intel graphics for that separately).

Whilst it's definitely fine for experimenting and playing, a laptop is 
NOT the place for CUDA for obvious reasons. After a couple of minutes 
thermal throttling will kick in mercilessly and a prehistoric PC with 
some crusty old discrete card (and proper cooling) will proceed to 
annihilate it, comparatively speaking.

You probably know this full well but just sayin'.

I had a monster Dell mobile workstation from work for a bit with Quadro 
graphics that I was excited to test CUDA on (this was quite a while 
back). Let's just say it didn't end well and thank god for Dell next day 
business support contracts.

Cheers
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