I am upgrading hardware; what graphics card would anyone recommend for OpenSUSE 12.1, for a PCIe slot? I am on 1600x900 resolution. It would also be for some Windows games likes Portal, but not really cutting edge, and my 5-year old AGP GeForce 6800 GT handles that. I assume any PCIe card would be much better - no? So I am looking at low to mid-range. Looking in the forum here there seem to be problems with all of them!
I am inclined towards a GeForce processor as I have had those before.
I am also attracted to AMD Radeon HD as AMD are better Linux supporters (or are they?) and I will have an AMD CPU. There seem lots of Radeon HD5450 based cards on the market but they get poor reviews here :-
… knocks my poor old laptop for six - it never did finish loading the page and I could not type or move my cursor for 3 minutes. It seems like it analyses your PC without asking, and it puts me off.
The “Linux Hardware Compatability” websites that Google turns up mostly seem about 10 years out-of-date. Is that because compatability is no longer an issue?
Another point - the catalogue websites seem to say that over half the cards for sale are “Low Profile”. What is the issue here? The backplate looks the same so no height is being saved. Why does it matter as long as they fit in a standard ATX case? Are we losing something by their being “low profile”?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
PS - I notice in my post preview that links I give get dumbed down from URLs into linked descriptions. One description was so long that it dominated my post, so I removed it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Does it always do that?
I am using an AMD based pc with AMD 4200 HD built-in card (with Gigabyte 880-udh2) on openSUSE 11.4. It is working great. tested with open-source driver & proprietary driver. I tweak a little bit (tear free) with proprietary driver. But the open-source driver is little bit better in HD video playing but not good for gaming.
AMD 5770 would be a good choice. I hear AMD 66xx have performance issues comparing 55xx in opensuse 11.4/12.1.
Please use KDE, because AMD has poor support in GNOME 3 in openSUSE 12.1
It is my opinion you get your best results using video cards that use the nVIDIA GPU and thus able to load the latest nVIDIA driver for which they release very frequent updates. I am using a GT 560 in my main PC and it works great. You can use the following blog to send you to a site to compare different video cards to together.
Thanks for the advice guys, and jdmcdaniel3’s link to that list was helpful.
I have now ordered a KFA2 GeForce GT 430 1 Gb. I liked the fact that it has passive cooling - no fan to stop turning. Instead it has a massive heatsink on a full height card; no “low-profile” for me. I never did hear the point of “low profile” video cards. Anyway, I will let you now how I get on with it.
On the Linux Format forum, for a low-ish end card someone recommended the GT 430 over the newer GT 520 :-
The GT 520 is said to be “greener”; to hell with that - if the world wants to be green there are plenty of areas that need tackling before we start crippling video cards.
Hassan65 wrote “Please use KDE, because AMD has poor support in GNOME 3 in openSUSE 12.1”
Sure I use KDE. That is why I use OpenSUSE, it is said to be the best distro implementation of KDE around. Wouldn’t using Gnome on KDE be like going into a 5-star fish restaurant and ordering steak?
Sounds good and you must come back and tell us how well the new video card works. I must ell you of one experience I had with a fan-less video card. It was an nVIDIA 8500 GPU with an interesting setup in that you could connect an audio coaxial input from your sound card and send it out the HDMI connection to your receiver or TV. It worked great, but the case cooling fan, which was very small for fans these days died on me. Shortly afterwords, the video card then also passed away. I did not know at first just what had happened. So, make sure your case has a good cooling setup just in case and good luck.