So after suffering through the (self-inflicted) pain of
trying to run an AMD GPU under Linux, I bought an nVidia-based GTX 650ti to try
out next.
Asus GTX 650ti
The 650ti doesn't have the best reputation for value (with performance
that is similar if not worse than the much cheaper HD7770), but it seemed to go okay in
reviews and is realistically already overkill for anything I'm going
to use it for.
In box
I narrowed the choices down to an Asus version versus the MSI Power
Edition. While I'd heard goods things about the MSI PE cards, in the
end it came down to:
- DVI-D ports (compared to DVI-I).
- HDMI ports (compared to mini-HDMI. I have plenty of HDMI cables,
but no mini ones).
- Low noise level and temperatures in reviews (though the MSI
is similar here anyway).
Ports
Installation
Compared to the troubles I had with the AMD, getting the nVidia card up
and running is a breeze. Admittedly, I cheated this time and went
straight to the proprietary driver. The open-source driver (nouveau)
worked fine straight after installing the card, and I'll probably
keep an eye on it (it's apparently made some recent advances in
capability). But, I was tired, and just wanted something to work,
so I cheated.
Plugged in to motherboard
To see which drivers are installed, you can use:
For more (or heaps more) information, you can use -vv or -vvv to the
above command. Running with sudo gives you a bit of extra output as
well.
Initially you'll see a line something like this in the VGA controller
section:
Kernal modules: nouveau, nvidiafb
These are the open-source drivers installed automatically in recent
kernels.
To install the proprietary drivers, you can use aptitude to look up
the possible targets:
To get going, all you need is to do the following:
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
$ sudo <reboot>
The xconfig command above writes a default file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
If all installs correctly, repeating the lspci command above will
now output something like:
Kernel modules: nvidia_current, nouveau, nvidiafb
Results
Everything worked without a hitch. Running nvidia-settings
lets you set up dual monitors. After rebooting, for the first time
the login screen was actually two separate screens, rather than
mirrored.
There was no obvious increase in noise levels with the Asus card,
which is nice.
It's definitely far from perfect though. There are some noticeable
artifacts when watching HD video, for example, and some minor
tearing while running the game Dungeon Defenders. But at the moment
I'm going to take "everything's working and it was easy to set up"
over "pixel perfect display". Maybe if it annoys me enough I'll
investigate some more, but I'm happy to run as is for the time being.
Update 15/6/2013:
Some months later, I've still been unable to resolve the tearing issue. It also
occurs when scrolling up or down in web pages as well as in games/video, and is frustrating beyond
belief that such a trivial action causes screen tearing with vendor-provided
drivers.
The issue occurs on multiple computers I've used, all with different hardware
and distros, so I can only conclude that nVidia's driver is broken.
Update 3/7/2013:
Forgot to link to it, but I ended up fixing the tearing
issue. Unfortunately, I found it only worked with Mint/Cinnamon rather
than Xubuntu.
