For years and years I’ve used nothing but AIT video cards. In my latest computer, I installed a XFX card with an AMD (ATI) 7950 chip and 3G memory. Using openSuse 12.3, and KDE, the performance is really great. BUT! I couldn’t use any of the super eye candy until I loaded the proprietary driver. Now, the nice smooth screen scrolling of text that was working in Firefox, is no longer there. Some pictures are not anywhere as good.
Oh well, 13.1 is ready!
What a disappointment! With the supplied driver, there are anomalies with the windows that are really not acceptable. Don’t see how to install the proprietary driver.
I guess I’ll wait to see what happens.
So! I purchased a new laptop (Toshiba with an on board intel graphics chip.) Replaced the factory drive with a new, clean drive and did an install of 13.1. WOW! Everything works very well! Nice eye candy, smooth scrolling, standard driver, just works!
Now I feel that the AMD chipped card is the root of far too many problems. Because of the experience with the laptop, I’d replace it with an Intel chipped card but there doesn’t seem to be any. That means Nvidia. As I’ve had absolutely no experience with Nvidia cards, I coming here to ask for advice in choosing the right one.
I want a card that supports PCIe 3 so I won’t be obsolete next week.
I do want full, no holds barred performance for playing full screen videos such as on youtube and for such things as the desktop cube effect.
I may want to add another monitor in the future.
I don’t play any games, nor boot to Windows.
Is there a difference in the manufacturer of the card? I mean, would an Asus card be as good or better than say a EVGA (I just picked two as examples)?
Did I over do it with 3G memory?
What chipset?
You Nvidia guys out there, here’s a chance to make a convert!
Two ways: Either download it from the AMD homepage and install it yourself.
Or install the driver RPMs using the 1-click install.
See here: openSUSE Lizards
Now I feel that the AMD chipped card is the root of far too many problems. Because of the experience with the laptop, I’d replace it with an Intel chipped card but there doesn’t seem to be any. That means Nvidia. As I’ve had absolutely no experience with Nvidia cards, I coming here to ask for advice in choosing the right one.
Well, an Nvidia card probably won’t work too well either with the open source driver. (IMHO the situation is even worse there, but it depends on the specific card of course…)
And there’s still no official openSUSE repo for 13.1. (Although it should be available real soon now)
So you have to download the nvidia driver from their homepage and install it “the hard way”: SDB:NVIDIA the hard way - openSUSE
Not that it’s really hard, but I don’t see how you would be able to do that if you don’t even see how to install the AMD driver…
Two ways: Either download it from the AMD homepage and install it yourself.
Or just install the driver RPMs using the 1-click install.
See here: openSUSE Lizards
Now I feel that the AMD chipped card is the root of far too many problems. Because of the experience with the laptop, I’d replace it with an Intel chipped card but there doesn’t seem to be any. That means Nvidia. As I’ve had absolutely no experience with Nvidia cards, I coming here to ask for advice in choosing the right one.
Well, an Nvidia card probably won’t work too well either with the open source driver. (IMHO the situation is even worse there…)
And there’s still no official openSUSE repo for 13.1. (Although it should be available real soon now)
So you have to download the nvidia driver from their homepage and install it “the hard way”: SDB:NVIDIA the hard way - openSUSE
Not that it’s really hard, but I don’t see how you would be able to do that if you don’t even see how to install the AMD driver…
I do have the AMD driver installed in 12.3. Not completely happy with it, not completely happy with the radeon driver either. Last I read, the AMD driver was not yet ready for 13.1 and, as I am having far too many problems with that version, the video driver wasn’t considered important enough to bother with yet.
I do take seriously though, your comments about the Nvidia card. Thanks.
On 2013-11-30, montana suse user <montana_suse_user@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> I don’t play any games, nor boot to Windows.
<SNIP>
> You Nvidia guys out there, here’s a chance to make a convert!
I have much experience of various AMD and Nvidia cards in Linux. Sadly I share your experiences, despite Linus giving
Nvidia the finger and AMD’s sponsorship of the openSUSE project.
If you don’t play games but still want the best of Nvidia performance, I recommend you buy the best Quadro card you can
afford.
The one-click file that was recommended contains a section that selects which version of openSusue is running, and add the proper repository. Unfortunately, the site Index of /mirror/amd-fglrx contained neither the directory openSUSE_Tumbleweed nor openSUSE_13.1 . So of course, the operation failed.
I downloaded the driver directly from AMD and attempted to install it. I got no response other than the creation of a directory under the current one.
Fortunately, the latest open driver allows the use of 3D and I am able to use the desktop effects I so dearly love!
Unfortunately, during all this process, I found that if I changed any of the decorations on the windows, in the file oxygenrc, a section called Windeco was created and two settings BlendStyle=BlendNone and DrawTitleOutline=true were created. After I made the change to the decorations, any program that was started resulted in a crash of KDE and the login screen appeared. Only the removal of the Windeco section allows me to use that account again.
There are so many little annoyances in this version. If I go Configure Desktop and make a change to the logon screen, such as add a picture to the user, the color scheme gets reset to the default. The popup asking for the root password is hidden behind the current window. I miss the rock solid 12.3 version. But I’ll stay with 13.1 as it will be supported for much longer.
Thanks to flymail and Wolfi323 for your responses and recommendations.
Well, the beta repo (mentioned in the article I linked to) does contain it for nearly 2 weeks.
And the stable repo does contain it now, too, so that 1-click install should work now. Please try it again.
I downloaded the driver directly from AMD and attempted to install it. I got no response other than the creation of a directory under the current one.
The last stable driver does not work on 13.1.
You need the latest beta for that.
A new stable version (working on kernel 3.11 and up) should come out some time in December AFAIK.
If you use the 1-click install from my post, you’ll get that as update automatically then.
Yes thank you ATI/AMD!
I have read on different forums that the open source driver in kernel 3.11 works better and better on AMD. I will remind that when I have visit pre/beta forum that Nvidia is causing more problems. Even whit proprietary drivers.
I’m happy with AMD-beta prop drivers because they are give me more functionality in both 12.3 and 13.1 whiteout to have to reboot after changes.
