[vox-tech] NVIDIA drivers

[Wes Hardaker]

>>>>> "h" == hajhouse  <hajhouse at houseag.com> writes:

h> I've avoided NVIDIA's video cards like the plague for the last few
h> years, because I really dislike the idea of being tied to a proprietary
h> driver.

Well, I've been down this road many times in the past.  I've had both
nvidia and ati cards at various times...  At least nvidia *offers* a
driver!

In the end, when I've tried the OSS vs proprietary drivers the
proprietary ones are *always* better when it comes to 3D
acceleration.  I've used both, but it's always something like Google
Earth that makes me go switch to NVidia's.

For Fedora, both the atrms and the livna repositories distributes the
pre-compiled drivers so a yum update should grab them.  (Yes, I
realize I'm speaking to a largely Debian crowd).

The biggest problem with the commercial drivers is that at some point
their installation system drops support for older cards and you have
to make sure you start grabbing the backwards-compatibility snapshot
instead (again, the rpm repositories above distributes compat versions
too).


FYI, I do have my mythtv box up and running (and love it) and I did
end up using nvidia drivers for it to get the SVideo output on the
card to work.  My older box that was my test case for my myth box
before I built it completely also has a old nvidia card in it and it's
yet to have fallen "out of support" although it's fairly old at this
point (old enough I don't remember when I got it, though I'd bet 4-5
years).
-- 
"In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap,
 and much more difficult to find."  -- Terry Pratchett