Hi all,
my first post here, please tell me if this post is in wrong place, or wrong in another way…
I’m in the process of buying a new desktop PC, by my own specs.
I am in doubt about the graphics part:
I’m not a gamer, nor a professional photographer. Sometimes I do a bit of simple video-editing, and I love desktop-effects like wobbly windows.
I don’t fundamentally reject closed source drivers, and I’m not afraid of the CLI. However, I don’t want a broken graphical environment every week or so.
I’ll use dual monitors (HDMI & DVI-D)
That given, can someone advice:
my motherboard (yet to be bought) is ASUS PRIME B250M-A, with embedded INTEL graphics.
Will this meet my needs?
Or is it better to buy a simple NVIDIA card?
And if so, will the nouveau driver do the job?
Or are the closed nvidia driver needed?
Hopefully there are people around with experience about this? Or just an opinion?
Thx,
Rolf
At the moment I keep and recycle 2 openSUSE desktops that I get from Grays Online. They always have Intel graphics, I choose that deliberately. They never miss a video beat.
When I put in Nvidia cards, which I do from time to time, I only have to pay attention once, associated with installing the drivers once, and from there on things are smooth.
But if I use the rolling distro Tumbleweed, I take out any Nvidia cards and fall back on the embedded Intel (mostly because I’m lazy, just want to get the work done).
Here’s a suggestion: see how your Asus motherboard goes with the Intel graphics, then think about Nvidia if Intel is not up to scratch. But from what you said about your usage needs, Intel should be OK (for your usage).
For awhile now,
Intel graphics cards have been well supported but keep in mind that that Intel contributes updates through the mainline kernel.
That has benefits, like near automatic detection, installation and configuration… the necessary driver is always built-in, pre-compiled and “just works.” No need to find anything else to install, and if you do that likely won’t result in any improvement and more than likely would be a fail.
On the other hand, that also means that if you select a brand new, just-released motherboard with an Intel chip that might be only weeks old, the drivers for your brand new bleeding edge hardware won’t likely be available yet. It might take at least a couple months for a stable kernel supporting your hardware to finally make it to widespread distribution. You might have options to compile a kernel yourself, but it’s uncertain how well that might work.
Some people prefer a higher performing GPU, so would consider nVidia or AMD, particularly if you might be doing something that might be computationally heavy. You’d also have the option of doing GPU computing if you have an app that supports that. For both nVidia and AMD, you have choices to run proprietary or non-proprietary drivers… If one of these GPUs is detected, openSUSE will automatically install a non-proprietary driver which you can change later if you wish.
thanks for the replies.
The step-by-step strategy swerdna is suggesting came to my mind as well.
First start embedded, if that isn’t what I want, then add an NVidia-card (maybe even the one from my old PC).
Start that with nouveau-driver. If that isn’t what I want, add nvidia-driver.
Am I right that I can’t use the nvidia-repo with Tumbleweed (because of the frequent updates), so have to go with ‘the hard way’?
Have here a handful of NVIDIA with TW. If you need any specific driver: Don’t try it on TW. I have to remove even xf86 nouveau with current 4.10 kernel, otherwise NVIDIA graphics are broken. With Intel no problem with TW (graphics) as of yet.