On Thursday, September 16, 2010 02:47:17 am David C. Rankin wrote:
On 09/13/2010 01:52 AM, C. Brouerius van Nidek wrote:
Will keep this explanation handy ;)
But what are the advantages of the nividia driver towards the nouveau driver. Would I see improvements apart from the Nvidia splash screen halfway booting?
Bottom line is the nvidia driver contains the closed-source optimizations, gpu downclocking, and performance benefits that the nv driver is working to achieve. The nv driver is good, but it doesn't have the benefit of the chipset level optimizations that the nvidia driver has. I have used the nvidia driver on everything from opensuse (I think 9.0 with my old MX440) to 11.2 and my 8800GT and I always get better performance/stability out of the nvidia driver. If the nvidia driver gets broken by an update, then I'll drop back to the nv driver until the nvidia driver gets fixed.
The easiest thing to do if you still run an xorg.conf is just keep and xorg.conf.nvidia and an xorg.conf.nv. The only/main difference is the Driver line. For the nvidia driver, do something like this:
Section "Device" BoardName "GeForce 8800 GT" BusID "2:0:0" Driver "nvidia" Identifier "Device[0]" VendorName "NVIDIA" Option "Coolbits" "1" EndSection
for the nv driver, do this:
Section "Device" BoardName "GeForce 8800 GT" BusID "2:0:0" Driver "nv" Identifier "Device[0]" VendorName "NVIDIA" EndSection
Then just 'cp xorg.conf.nvidia xorg.conf' to load the nvidia driver or 'cp xorg.conf.nv xorg.conf' to load the nv driver and restart X.
and.. yes you can edit the xorg.conf file by hand despite all the nonsense at the top of the file. It is just a standard text config file. As a matter of fact, if you want to optimize your graphics performance, you can add/remove/change options for your card and setup that can really help your graphics system perform. You can google something like 'xorg.conf tweaks nvidia' and probably find a wealth of info that will help.
Enjoy! (and always backup your original xorg.conf before you start hacking :)
Thanks David. That was the last and important info I was hoping for as to why hunt the nvidia driver. Due to the inability to automatically to recognize my monitor setting since the dead of sax2 I have to use a "xorg.conf". Did not find another way to save my monitor refresh rate. And now I am up to change back to nvidia. -- Linux User 183145 using LXDE on a Pentium IV , powered by openSUSE 11.3 (i586) Kernel: 2.6.36-rc3-16-desktop LXDE WM & KDE Development Platform: 4.5.1 (KDE 4.5.1) 12:00pm up 1 day 14:00, 3 users, load average: 1.68, 1.25, 1.22 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org