As noted in other posts, I have had a lot of trouble getting my video to work. I have an older Lenovo PC with an nvidia card that needs G05 (470 driver) to work. I locked the 6.11 kernel to make the card work but upgrading to 6.12 kernels broke my system.
I have very modest video needs. I don’t do gaming and little video editing etc. I went to the local computer store to look for replacement video cards. A modest card at a modest price. They recommended two cards.
The first was a Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 card with 2 GB. This may be an updated card but keeps me in the nvidia world that has been troublesome in TW.
The second card was a PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 550 Red Dragon with 4GB.
I have a two monitor setup. The main monitor is an old tv - Sharp 32" HDMI. The other monitor is a Lenovo 19" and had no problems until I upgraded to the 6.12.9 kernel.
Please give me your opinion/advice on these or other cards.
Personally, I don’t think I’d go below 8GB in 2024, even for a budget card, but if you don’t play games or use AI, the RX 550 might be fine for your needs. I used my R9 390 up until last year with no problems, and the only reason I upgraded was because the newest games ran a bit slowly.
I don’t much keep track of video memory here, am sure I have at least two discrete AMD cards that have only 500M or less RAM yet support two displays, and have none with more than 1G, all of which support two or three of my displays at once. I run as many as 4 displays on my AMD iGPUs and am not sure whether those motherboards permit allocating more than 1G of system RAM to the iGPU. NAICT, more than minimal RAM for ordinary mortal non-gamer users is a waste of money, unless “ordinary” includes those using more than one 4K display at a time. Ordinary use certainly doesn’t warrant the recurring hassles reported here and elsewhere that so many users report with NVidia proprietary driver installation and maintenance.
All that said, the newest NVidia cards supposedly lack dependence on proprietary drivers, so if you are adventurous and don’t mind a possible need for futzing with young drivers or bug reporting, you might wish to consider a budget model of the latest generation of NVidia cards. I suspect a GT1030 is not part of the latest generation, but without using hwinfo, lspci or inxi, it can be tough to determine what generation any given model belongs to, given the marketers’ history of rereleasing old GPUs with new model numbers alongside genuinely newer GPUs.
I built one of our desktop machines back in 2018. It has an XFX RX-560 4GB, which drives a Dell 38" curved monitor at its full resolution - still going strong to this day, with zero issues.
@Prexy The RX550 should still run fine? Locking down a kernel and not upgraded will cause way more problems down the road. You should be looking at fixing the Nvidia card issue, or it could be a desktop issue… I do believe there where some issues with the drivers installed via the rpm awhile back, but all fixed now
The kernel is now at 6.12.10-1-default not I use the Nvidia card for offload and use the run file and no issues here.
If you want to look at a new GPU, consider the Intel ARC GPU (depending on your motherboard). I have two systems here running Intel ARC GPU’s on PCIe 3.0 opencl, oneapi etc all works OTB these days;
Thank you all for the input and advice. I will research what cards will satisfy these recommendations within my desired price range. The first thing I must do is get the pc in question up and running to check out the possibilities you have mentioned.
I don’t want to throw a curve ball after all this input, but I remember the clerk asked me about cables, both internal and hdmi. I thought he might just be trying to add to a sale since I can see no reason that cables would be going bad. The hdmi cable is easy to switch, so maybe I will try that as well.
I looked at this AMD card. The price is $85 and the next card up , with similar specs is double the price. I think this falls within recommendations here.
Visiontek AMD Radeon RX 550 LP Single Fan 4GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 Graphics Card
4GB GDDR5 128-bit Memory
3840 x 2160 Maximum Resolution
PCIe 3.0
Low Profile, Single Slot
DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0
Is display port old tech? I looked at an Intel card, as suggested. It has 3 Display Ports with an HDMI. It is $120 and looks like overkill for my needs.
6GB GDDR6 96-bit Memory
7680 x 4320 Maximum Resolution
PCIe 4.0
Full Height, Dual Slot
DisplayPort 2.0, HDMI 2.0b
I feel a little silly asking about these low priced cards when most of you probably have $700-$1,000 cards!
Hmmm. Not sure who suggested that. For the XFX card I mentioned earlier for our desktop machine, it uses DP for the cable interface.
‘DisplayPort is considered slightly better than HDMI, especially for high-performance setups like gaming PCs, as it typically offers higher bandwidth, allowing for higher resolutions and refresh rates, and also supports daisy-chaining multiple monitors with a single cable, while HDMI is more widely compatible with various devices like TVs and is preferred for home entertainment setups due to its wider device support’.
Our XFX card was released back in 2017 - I bought it in Aug 2018 (found the receipt) for $145.00 USD. Everyone has reasons for choosing specific hardware. Our reason? We wanted something that is well supported, hassle-free, and we invested a little extra $$ because we knew it would be in that machine for a long time. Basically, we wanted “plug-n-play”.
That card was a bit pricey at the time, considering what you can buy these days for less money - but that’s electronics for you. They improve over time and drop in price.
But here’s my thought - bought that XFX card in 2018 and it’s now 2025, so that card is still strong, almost seven years later. We are NOT gamers, though we enjoy manipulating photographic images, which is the most “intense” graphics we need. A long-time software engineer, now retired five years, so have simple needs
It’s origin is newer than HDMI. HDMI was designed for TV duty, and requires manufacturer licensing (cost) to include in a device. DP was designed for computer duty by a computing industry consortium, with no licensing cost. DP’s MST for daisy chaining makes for better docking stations and fewer cables at least in theory. Standard DP connectors lock in place, so are at least theoretically more reliable, but cannot make up for cheap cable construction. I won’t buy anything computer graphics-related that doesn’t support DP. Every working widescreen PC display I own provides at least one DP input. Same, except for one MSI motherboard, goes for outputs on PCs and motherboards made since 2007.
It seems best that you opt for the AMD card. If your needs are indeed very modest, the 4 GB model should be fine. It’s wise for you to shy away from Nvidia card not only due to the lower VRAM, but also because Nvidia drivers do not play as well with Linux.
@Prexy No way All my recent GPU’s (Intel and Nvidia) are between US$100-US$150 the most recent was the Intel A310ELF and was US$99, although I am eyeing up a Nvidia RTX4000 for my primary desktop if they drop below US$300.
I’m not going to get anything AMD related, they seem to have a habit of randomly dropping support, getting GPU features requires jumping through hoops. In saying that I do have AMD gpu hardware in a couple of laptops and a RX550 (In my junk box), but I don’t do anything of significance on those systems, surf the internet and LibreOffice mainly…
I have this card inside my other desktop and it works perfectly. The HDMI electronics on it, also includes an audio device. To use that audio with an HDMI connection between the card and the display, requires the PC speakers plugged directly into the display.
@Prexy I agree with @Svyatko that the older AMD GPU’s using the radeon driver are too old these days…
So what is you end goal for this system, there are a plethora of Mini PC’s around with intel gpu’s that can do hardware encoding/decoding. I have a small Beelink device circa US$170 there are newer models with the N150 cpu only 4 cores, but 16GB of RAM come with an NVMe etc…
I have one running my ADS-B setup (Leap 15.6) that’s a N5095 CPU/iGPU and 8GB of RAM with a 128GB M.2 SSD.
I have one (Beelink) with a N100 CPU/iGPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB M.2 NVMe running Aeon since it supports TPM 2.0.
With AMD, I wouldn’t recommend “upgrading” to anything older than than the Radeon RX5000 series at this point, just from a “is this going to continue to get driver support in a reasonable manner for the foreseeable future” perspective.
AMD has a habit of having a much shorter driver support lifetime than the other two vendors, and things based on the RDNA microarchitecture are likely to have better “future proofing” than the earlier GCN architecture.
That being said, you’re probably fine for the next few years, in general, with anything Radeon RX400 and newer.
I wouldn’t personally bother spending money on anything older than that.