Re: Nvidia card swap
On Tue, 4 Jul 2017 14:26:51 +0200
Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik(a)greysector.net> wrote:
On Tuesday, 04 July 2017 at 09:01, Robin Laing wrote:
> Tried to load the Catalyst driver and it caused many problems.
This is the closed source driver provided by AMD. I have never used it.
Radeon HD 3000 series (R600 series) is well supported by the open
source "radeon" driver.
This makes sense since unlike nouveau, the open source driver for
nvidia, radeon developers have access to the hardware api because amd
has released the specs. nvidia hasn't released the interface specs for
their cards, so the nouveau developers are reverse engineering the
interface, a more difficult and error prone operation.
The thing I like about using the radeon driver is that it is in the
kernel, and so I can build a local kernel from the latest Fedora
src.rpm package for rawhide, and run it on my stable release without
worrying about video drivers. That just isn't possible with the nvidia
closed source driver until nvidia releases a version for the latest
kernel. At least it wasn't possible when I used to have nvidia
hardware, perhaps it has changed. Running radeon also means that
switching between the virtual consoles and the graphical gui is
seamless, whereas there used to be a delay and flash when using nvidia.
I'm not a gamer, and specs usually show that the latest nvidia hardware
has better performance for such tasks, so YMMV.