Ubuntu Multimedia :: Choosing A Graphics Card - Price Vs Performance?
Mar 11, 2011
i have an ati radeon x1550 (pretty old, i know) graphics card which worked perfectly under windows 7. i recently read that ati appears to have dropped support for this card installed on recent ubuntu distributions (i'm using ubuntu 10.10 + kde 4.6.1) the thing is, when i'm watching something on videos or playing a movie through vlc, the image looks jittery (random horizontal lines that break the image, it's pretty subtle but it's there...) i'm new to ubuntu (switched from windows 7 a couple of months ago) and what i'm looking for is one of two:
-either a solution to my drivers problem so i can use this card with full 2d and 3d support (like i used to in windows) or, a recommendation of which graphic card i should switch to (my motherboard has a 'pci express x16' slot). i've searched countless forums and sites but i can't reach a final conclusion: am i supposed to have good 2d and 3d acceleration with this card (with the right drivers installed)?
if the answer is 'no', then i'd like to know what i should buy. for what i've read, apparently i should stay away from ati and intel and look for nvidia. i'm not a gamer so i really don't need an incredible 3d acceleration (although some would be nice, just in case) what i really need is for my system to be snappy (i work with my computer) and most of all good support for multimedia apps (i would like to be able to use xbmc smoothly for instance) i'd like to know which is the cheapest graphics card that i can get that will meet my needs (the ones i just listed above)
Im now in the process of buying new hardware for my computer (mobo, disk, memory...the works). Im researching what graphics card I should buy for my i386-system that causes the least amount of fuzz to get up n running with the right screen resolution and so on? It will be a Debian desktop system running X. I will be doing web surf, playing movies, streaming video, and using OO. No gaming. The graphics card will be a PCI-E card. My requirements are:
- Capable of screen resolutions up to 1680x1050 (22" screen)
- Dual-head (i want to be able to expand my dekstop to two diffrent screens). Double HDMI or DVI is not required, VGA and DVI for example is fine.
If I wanted to step away from the non-free world and constant battles between nvidia and amd, where would I go? I am considering updating my graphics card and would prefer to make the use of open source drivers and not bother with the proprietary ones but I still want a card that's going to be reliable and give good 3d performance to run unity and some 3d games.
I've recently been experimenting with glxgears, but found people saying this is not an ideal benchmark tool as there are many variants; for example resizing the window affects the FPS tremendously.
I'm interested in testing the difference between using the proprietary ATI driver and the open source driver and also the performance under various distributions.
What's the best software to benchmark graphics cards?
I have an ATI RADEON 7000 (taken from lspci) 64 MB graphics card. My computer has a 700 MHz Celeron CPU and 650 MB RAM with Ubuntu 10.04. Anything graphical is slow. I cannot even play basic games like SuperTux. I think it is a graphics driver problem. Will this card ever work well with Linux, what do I need to do?
I have installed several different distro's over the last coupled of weeks and have finally as intended come back to 11.4. Last time I installed it my pc was fitted with an older nvidia card and I installed a newer 200 series and got it to work with X11 using the nvidia driver. This time I did the install with the new card in and things haven't gone the same way. I have finished up with the os drivers on my system, nouveau and "swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.10)". Performance wise it's way way behind the nvidia driver.
Glxgears for instance runs at under 1/2 the speed even at a lower resolution. I suppose I could still configure to suite my monitor but given that difference in performance would you? I have done what I can easily do with repositories but no signs of nvidia drivers. I can download one as I did last time but from what I have read previously the above drivers may mean that I have to recompile the kernel. A simpler solution might be to re install with my old card in. Can't say I'm too keen on either option. Some distro or the other had a driver helper and installed the nvidia one perfectly.
I am running kubuntu 9.10 on a dell inspiron 14 with an intel GM45 graphics card. When I run 3d games like Nexuiz, openarena and tremulous I get really random performance. Sometimes things are totally playable with somewhere between 50-80 fps and other times I get maybe 4 fps and everything takes forever to load. These effects persists between logouts, X restarts and reboots! I get no errors when I run things in console either.I never really play games much but when something doesn't work...
I have recently started using openshot to edit video and have found it very good. Previously I have been using Kino and openshot certainly seems more intuitive. Trouble is the more ambitious my productions the more juddery and prone to crashing the program becomes So I am thinking of an upgrade. At the moment I am using on board graphics. Or would more ram be the first thing to go for.
trying to get Ubuntu to work properly on a Del Dimension 2400. It has on board Intel Extreme graphics card. [URL] It installs and but runs slowly when the ubuntu GUI is up and running. The CPU is maxed out for quite small tasks. Selecting additional drivers gives nothing, so I guess it isn't running the graphics card in hardware acceleration - which is slowing down the system. I want to buy a graphics card to use on this Dell PC. It uses PCI expansion cards. I'm thinking of ebaying a second hand graphics card.
Okay first off I'm a noob with Ubuntu. I've been trying to get Warcraft 3 and WoW to run on ubuntu via Wine, so far I managed to get them installed and running but I always have problems with graphics (poor rendering as oposed to when I ran them on windows). So I figured that maybe the graphics card/driver aren't installed correctly.
On the terminal I got this information: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) I checked System > Administration > Additional Drivers When it finishes searching for drivers I get the message "No proprietary drives are in use on this system" (I have no idea what this means, I read elsewhere that I should check this) So um, I don't know If any of this is useful or necessary to fix my problem.
I have a Sapphire HD4850 X2 1G GDDR3 PCI-E graphis card, and presently I ruin a Windows 7 OS, but am moving to Ubuntu GUI Desktop, and was wandering where I could get Linux drivers for this card (and they are NOT available from the Sapphire site), or how I could get Windows drivers to work with this card, I do have 4 monitors using this card so I need the drivers and ability to use 4 monitors.
After having some trouble with Intel graphics I decided to pick up a PCI Nvidia graphics card. Now I am wondering what driver to use. Is the open source drive good enough to use or should I install the Nvidia driver? I know that things are generally easier with the default driver, especially for support on older cards, but I would like to get the best performance I can. This is for my Dad's computer, so he won't be playing any games, but if it will help with 2D and video that would be great.
The card is an Geforce FX5200 fanless card, I've heard they are well supported in Linux.The computer is a P4 Dell 3000 with Ubuntu desktop 10.04 32bit.
Just spent about 4 hours upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 thinking it would fix my graphics problems. Basically I have no 3d acceleration of any kind, is there any way i can load the intel drivers? Because what I'm using now is really crappy.
[code]...
Can i just change something in my xorg to intel and it will load that driver ? I've tried the "hardware drivers" thing but it does not show anything.
I have an older Dell Inspiron 4550 w/ 2G memory and 38G HD. I believe I have GE440 graphics card. I am running 10.04, but the graphics are slower than I would like and when I tried to upgrade to 10.10, my card was not supported and I had to re-install 10.04. - Can anyone recommend a good graphics card to choose for an upgrade for this machine? - Is changing graphics cards pretty much the same as installing a memory chip, What is the best way to do the upgrade?
I'm looking for advice on which is the best video card to get for Ubuntu 11.4. At the moment I have an INTEL SERIES 4 INTEGRATED GRAPHICS CONTROLLER and I can only get it recognized as a "VGA COMPATIBLE" Due to my eyesight I need to have the resolution smaller something like 1168 x 752 I dont need to be be able to play games or anything like that. Just typing, videos and general PC work. OR if anyone could point me in the direction of installing better drivers for my INTEL card as I know Windows XP can give me resolutions of this depth.
I have a lenovo ideapad z570 with intel i5 2nd gen 2410m processor and intel integrated graphics. In lshw, my graphics are shown as: "2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller"
Code: glxinfo| grep render returns: Code: direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile GEM 20100330 DEVELOPMENT x86/MMX/SSE2 Compiz works fine, so do some 2D games. However, performance is choppy on most other games(2D and 3D).
Are these graphics fully supported by Ubuntu yet? If not, does any other linux flavour have support for this?
Just fitted an Inno3D (I-7300LE-G4E3) graphics card and I get a distorted boot up screen, a virtually unreadble boot menu (lots of extra white bits all over the screen) and when the system is booting the black screen with "booting from .." and the underscore at the end, is covered with white commas (?!), then the login screen pops up for a fraction of a second, then get a blank screen and no signal-cant get anything after this (or from the vga port on the pc)-I ve tried logging in even though I cant see anything, but no music , nothing.
Thought I might have to download drievers AFTER I d installed it, but as I had this problem, I removed it and tried to download driers before installation. Not sure which of the 4 to try, but tried 2 and neither works-GDebi is offered as an app to open them but nothing happens, nothing happens if I just click on them and when I try and install them from a terminal with the script from the nVidia site, it says unable to open them.
I'm building a new Ubuntu system for use as a desktop machine and personal server (http, smb, smtp). It'll be based on an Intel i7 950 and a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 ATX Motherboard.
I'm looking for recommendations for a graphics card that will support dual monitors and runs well under Ubuntu. Would like some decent 3D support.
I got it into my head to change the graphics card in my Ubuntu 10.04 media center. I removed my old ATI card and installed a new ASUS ENGT 430. I tried to uninstall the ATI drivers and associated software prior to this but obviously I didn't get it all. When I boot into X it takes me in under low graphics mode. I've tried rebuilding my xorg.conf. I've installed the driver from the ASUS site and nothing.
I decided to swap in my old ATI card and obviously I've not cleared all the ATI artifacts as the low graphics mode that machine first booted into was at the high resolution that I was running previously. I uninstalled all Nvidia software but now I'm not even able to get the old ATI software to work. Jockey sees the drivers after I install them through the Software Center but they're not really working. XBMC won't start for GL reasons.
What do I need to purge all graphics drivers and install the nVidia driver? I've got a feeling if I started from scratch I could get it to work but I seriously don't want to reinstall everything. I've worked hard to get my XBMC config just so and I don't want to lose everything
Just tried and failed miserably to get an Nvidia 6200 based graphics card to play nice with my machine.After putting my ATI Radeon 9200 back in the box, my emulators have gone all kinds of strange.
ZSNES will crash as soon as I attempt to load a game full screen and will leave the screen resolution at the resolution ZSNES was running in (800 x 600, for example.GENS again will alter the screen resolution to whatever it was running in when the emulator is minimised. I'm running 10.10 with 1gb Ram, 128mb ATI Radeon card, P4 3ghz. Was all fine until I tried the new card and I did a fresh install only last week .
I am unable to get the hdmi audio for from my graphics card to work. I do not have any speakers to test the other two, and redundant, sound cards .My graphics card is the Nvidia gtx 285, I auto installed the drivers via ubuntu. It does not show up in the hardware tab of "sound preferences". It's not muted, I can't find anything relating to sound in nvidia-settings.but here is my aplay -l:Quote:
After I've installed an ASUS graphics card (ATI chip) my Ubuntu got no sound at all. My Codec is: VIA VT1708B 8-Ch. I've chosen "Internal Audio Analog Stereo" in Sound Preferences. Windows on the same machine works properly.
I have a problem with starting ubuntu 10.10, I changed my graphics card from an ATI card to a Nivida card a week or so ago (Machine has dual boot). I've sort out the windows install, but cant get into ubuntu to update the drivers. It boots as far as console but just leaves me with the text screen. How do I update the drivers from there or get a basic console screen to come up so I can update?
Using Ubuntu 9.10 I installed Ubuntu onto a second hard drive and everything seems to work fine except for the fact that I cannot install the driver (it says not supported or something) when I downloaded it from the website. I downloaded the driver made for Linux. The driver manager claims "no proprietary drivers." At the moment it shows to be using integrated graphics, but I need the full hardware graphics to play games. The open source alternate driver didn't work either.
It all started Tuesday morning. I woke up and turned my computer on. Normally I just leave it on all the time, but I turned it off the previous night for some reason. When I turned it on, everything worked fine for about 10 minutes, until my monitor said "Monitor Working Out of Scan Range." I messed with the settings on the monitor to try and get it back, but to no avail. Restarting would make it work, but for even shorter periods. It eventually would display the manufacturer image (Everex), and then go dead again with the same message.
I thought it was the monitor at first, and got a new one. The new one is a wide screen 18.5 inch Dell IN1910N. The problem persisted, so I knew it wasn't this. I kinda figured it out when I started smelling something burning coming from my computer, and discovered it was the graphics card I installed awhile back. It is the pci ATI X1550, and its fan no longer worked.
So I figured, well, I will just remove it and go back to the onboard video. Doing this worked fine, until I got to the stage where it tried to boot to the Xserver, and then the computer just hangs. No sounds indicate I ever get to a logon screen or anything.
Now, I tried commands like sudo dpkg-configure xserver-xorg, and it asked me a lot of questions about my keyboard, but didn't fix my video. I also tried the "Xfix" option in recovery mode, and it purged all the old fglrx drivers, but that didn't help either.
I am currently using a live CD (I was doing straight command-line for awhile, after I also played hell getting the wireless working). I tried literally coping and pasting the entire contents of the X11 folder over, but that didn't work either (the xorg.conf files were the same anyway). I don't know what to do to get my old partition to boot X correctly.
All the commands I was copying before are not in my terminal now, and I'm not sure exactly what command-line information you need. I know that Openchrome is supposed to run the onboard VIA video, but I don't recall the command that tells me everything about it.
I have a PCI graphics card, Nvidia Geforce FX 5500, but can't get it to work. I have 10.04 installed on a Dell Dimension 3000, P4, 1Gb RAM, integrated graphics. I installed 10.04 without the card in the machine, then shut down and plugged the card in and booted it up again (BIOS setting is 'onboard' for integrated graphics, 8Mb; only other option is 'auto'). Checking the hardware drivers I can see the recommended Nvidia drivers (v173, not yet activated) and lspci gives me the integrated as well as the Nvidia listing:
So far so good, but that's where it ends. Changing the BIOS setting to 'auto' turns the screen off on reboot, both for the monitor connected to the VGA port of the Nvidia card and for the monitor connected to the VGA port of the motherboard. I have to shutdown, take the card out and set the BIOS back to 'onboard' to be able to boot again (and shutdown, plug the card back in and boot up again to get back to where I was).
Activating the recommended hardware driver and rebooting (still with BIOS set to onboard) gives a blank screen (screen is still on and there may have been a flash of the purple screen with the ubuntu logo); nothing else happens no matter how long I wait. Rebooting doesn't help, it turns off the screen; same result for booting in recovery mode. I can get to the GRUB bootloader and when I replace 'quiet splash' with 'nomodeset' I manage to boot again with the monitor connected to the VGA port of the motherboard, but am not anywhere closer to getting my monitor working on the Nvidea card.
I'm busy building a machine now and I'm looking to set up dual monitors because it's something I've always fancied but never had the resources to do. I'm basically looking for advice on choosing a graphics card that will support dual monitors with good driver support under Ubuntu. After a few hours of browsing the forums I determined nVidia were the way to go but I'm honestly not bothered if people want to suggest ATI. I'm not a gamer so really only need the card to support dual monitors. I'll also need to know how to set up the card under Ubuntu and then subsequently how to edit xorg.conf in order to get the dual monitors working.
I actually do have a GeForce4 MX 460 in this pc. I have a 7950gt in a different pc. Oops. I guess the MX 460 cant do 1600x1200 on the dvi output but somehow it can do it on the vga output? I guess I could just use a vga connection instead of the dvi connection.
The problem I'm having is that my LCD monitor (acer AL2021) can't be used at it's native resolution of 1600x1200. This is probably because my GeForce 7950gt graphics card is not being recognized. Xorg seems to think my card is a GeForce4 M 460. (It's not, really!) I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Here's what I've been doing for the last few hours:
Am using ACER Aspire 5745G which has switchable graphics. I recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 - the Natty Narwhal i updated everything after the installation. Now the issue is that when i go to NVIDIA X Server Settings, its giving me an error message:- " You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server. " Error.jpg also tried searching in the forum but it was so confusing, as am Newbie i have no idea where to start.
I already posted this message on another thread but I'd like to start a new thread with it now, and add a few more details. My son and I are having trouble getting the graphics card to work properly in his computer. The resolution is good, but the graphics card is not fully functioning. He works on animation and graphics of several kinds, and the graphics programs cannot run without a fully functioning graphics card.
The computer will not run Blender and other graphics programs. Nor will it even allow for the "normal" "Visual Effects" in the "Appearance Preferences." (It comes up with the error: "Desktop effects could not be enabled," after it tries to find the driver.) The system is:
We know the graphics card works because it works in Windows. (We set up the computer to boot off of either of two hard drives -- either in Windows XP or Ubuntu 9.10, karmic.) Neither my son nor I understand much of the terminology on your forums, although I have been using Ubuntu for some years and have read quite a bit. (I also have the "Beginning Ubuntu Linux" book.) I love Ubuntu, but sometimes I just cannot figure out how to get some things running. We have tried many different ways of installing the drivers and setting up the xorg.conf file. We have followed the instructions on this and other threads. We also installed NVIDIA-Linux-x86-64-190.53-pkg2.run, as well as 173 and 185. The screen will only work at a proper resolution when we set the "Driver" to "nv" in the xorg.conf file. The screen goes completely blank and dead if we set the "Driver" to "nvidia." Then we need to reboot in safe mode and edit the xorg.conf file with VIM.
