Hey friends,
I just moved my desktop to Linux and am trying to deside what drives to run. I do not plan to do to going under linux, just programming watching videos and light stuff. That being said gaming would be a nice extra. I am bual booting with Windows 10 (have some windows locked suff for school). Anyway what should I go with an why? Currently I have the nivida drivers and have tearing issues I haven't been able to fix.
from January 7th however probably relevant enough:
Open-Source Nouveau Linux 4.10 + NvBoost vs. NVIDIA Proprietary Linux Driver Performance
In my experience, Nouveau plays a little more nicely integrating with the various DE's in Linux and just general ease of use.
With that said, with gaming, you'll likely need to use the Nvidia drivers for proper performance. You're also trusting that NVIDIA isn't doing anything shady with their drivers, though no one has found reason to be skeptical.
The open source drivers generally cause less problems, so if you don't need the performance go with nouveau. Note that nouveau's support varies a lot between GPU generations however, so you'll just have to try it out.
If you want to game in linux AMD is the real option there. Nvidia kills their drivers after a year and even before they do that they have shitty support if something goes wrong.
Ptherwise, yeah proprietary drivers I guess.
What GPU do you have? Maxwell or Pascal the Nvidia driver is a must.
Proprietary drivers, no question.
Nouveau has always given me horrible performance — and I'm not even considering gaming. I currently have a 1050ti; the nouveau drivers won't recognize multiple monitors, and won't allow me to change the resolution from 720p.
Before this, I was using a 750ti. Things weren't as bad but it was still borderline-unusable.
for screen tearing, http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/got-tearing-with-proprietary-nvidia-try-this solved it for me. (Note that this option is a checkbox in the current version of nvidia-settings, so you don't even need to use the terminal.)
It really depends on your GPU. If you have a GTX 600 or 700 series Kepler card, nouveau may be useful for light 3D accelerated DEs and general desktop usage. Otherwise you'll have to put up with the Nvidia proprietary driver. It runs great but it breaks frequently with Xorg and Kernel updates.
Yeah, depends on the card. 4.12 Is just now offering 3d acceleration for the 10x nvidia cards.
Maxwell, from what most of you are saying using the nvidia drives is pretty much the only way to got me me since maxwell and I would liek to do light gaming, Need to fix the screen tearing issue, but it not a huge deal, it may have to do with just the refresh rates I have the monitors set to, frist time really having to play with my xorg config so trying to learn a good bit before i get to deep with it.
On the proprietary drivers, you can fix screen tearing by enabling "Force Full Composition Pipeline" as demonstrated here.