I have a rather old card, a GTX 560 Ti, attempting to boot from a usb drive causes the installer to enter an infinite loop. Free drivers seem to work fine but I wanted to see if there was a difference once I started up a game.
I always see people on reddit saying how they don’t work very well. So I guess my question is how good is Nouveau compared to Nvidia drivers for different generations of cards?
Also will you be buying Nvidia, AMD, or Intel graphics when you upgrade and why?
I am not competent enough to speak about which drivers to use, but I got so tired of my Nvidia graphics card (and the drivers and the screen tearing) that I replaced it with an AMD card instead. And my new computer is pure AMD, both CPU and GPU, and it works fantastic.
I’m no expert in graphics cards, nor in the comparison between AMD and Nvidia. If you spend some time with your favourite search engine, you can find an almost endless supply of comparisons, articles and reviews of the various bits of hardware available in the market. It’s a good start to understand the differences between the hardware itself.
For me:
I have a GL504GS laptop, it comes with the integrated Intel graphcis and a Nvidia RTX 2060 discrete graphics.
First, The Intel integrated graphics is intended to be for everyday use (desktop, web browser, etc) and it is tuned that way – it does just fine for that work at a low power envelope.
Second, The Nvidia card works well and takes a bit of fiddling to get working properly – but there are also many guides in the forum and on the wiki on how to do this. The nonfree drivers increase the performance significantly enough over the free drivers that I run the non-free.
Again, your favourite search engine is your friend here. A quick search on my self-hosted searx came up with this article as the first link that probably answers most of your question:
I actually can’t really complain to much here with my 1080 i had before even installing any Linux system. Drivers seem to be running stable. I have tried nouveau though at one point and it is no serious competitor. It’s good enough to get you going initially but cannot really use the card correctly.
As your card should be supported by currently available driver packages up to the 390xx package you might wanna switch to them after installing. The problem you describe starting the live system might be, because of a newer driver being shipped with it, that does not support your card anymore.
And for your last question, I’m thinking about what i will switch to after the new AMD generation is out and how it fairs from a technological standpoint. Last generation (5700XT etc.) AMD was about 1 gen behind in terms of performance/watt and only provided only about 70% the performance in their high end card compared to Nvidia. Given though that the biggest increases in performance came with higher power requirements with the 30xx gen and massive flaws in the cooling design for the high end cards, chances are good i will do a switch to AMD this gen. Ease of driver usage is a nice plus to have after all.
First, The Intel integrated graphics is intended to be for everyday use (desktop, web browser, etc) and it is tuned that way – it does just fine for that work at a low power envelope.
Thanks, I didn’t know that. If I had to guess, it’s looking at the future of cloud computing/Deep computing/Machine Learning and ensuring they can get a piece of that with the strong sales they have on the Server and the Desktop line – but this is way off topic for this thread.
A lot more detail here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16063/intel-launches-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-processors-and-evo-branding
