[SOLVED] Nouveau vs Proprietary Nvidia Drivers Performance

[Stellaris]

Repaired my machine with Geforce GT210 graphics card after an year which was running Linux Mint for years.
I installed Linux Mint 20 a week ago expecting the same smooth experience I had and everything went fine until I installed Nvidia drivers.
Suddenly, sometimes the system freezed for few seconds and went back to normal.
Worst scenario was the performance inside virtual machines.
I couldn't do anything inside vms because it gets freezed everytime when I try to do some work. No matter which distribution I used.
So today, I wiped the hard drive and installed Linux Mint 21.1 it works without any glitches. Even VMs works fine as I expect.
Only problem is no proprietary Nvidia drivers. The answer was found in this thread.

Linux Mint 21 and NVIDIA drivers - Linux Mint Forums

Your Nvidia graphics card is no longer supported. The open-source nouveau driver is your only option.

Nvidia states Support timeframes for Unix legacy GPU releases,"The Linux 340.* legacy driver series is the last to support the G8x, G9x, and GT2xx GPUs, and motherboard chipsets based on them. Support for X.Org xserver version 1.20 was added to the 340.* legacy driver series with version 340.107, and support for Linux kernels up to Linux 5.4 was added with version 340.108. No further releases from the 340.* series are planned."'

If you check the rest of the information for the graphics section of inxi, you will see Mint 21 uses X.Org version 1.21.1.3 (a version newer than 1.20). Additionally, you are using the 5.15 kernel (much newer than the 5.4 kernel). That means you have moved beyond what will work with the Nvidia-340 driver.

The Nvidia-340 driver received its last update in December 2019. If you want to continue using a proprietary driver with your current Nvidia card, you would have to go back to using an LM20 version.

Should I stay with Nouveau? I don't do video editing or anything like that. Just some music composing and programming in this machine.
Is Nouveau enough? or should I try installing Proprietary drivers from Nvidia website?

Thanks in advance.

 

[f33dm3bits]

If you don't do any video editing, gaming or other graphical intense work than you are just fine with the nouveau driver.

 

[Brickwizard]

I concur with @f33dm3bits , You can install legacy drivers, but they may not work as well with the newer kernels,

 

[kc1di]

Nvidia has been a mess with legacy drivers. I had to give up an older machine because neither nouveau or Nvidia's drivers would support it any longer. Puppy still worked. But that's just my gripe with Nvidia. As others have said you should be fine with nouveau. I would stick with that as long as it works.

 

[TheProf]

I had odd issues in the past as well with older nvidia GPUs using the proprietary drivers. For me, the desktop experience was also impacted. I find with newer GPUs, this is not an issue, but you're not going to buy a new GPU just to have the proprietary drivers work better.

Like @f33dm3bits , unless you're doing video editing or playing games, I don't see a need for proprietary drivers.

 

[wizardfromoz]

If you don't do any video editing, gaming or other graphical intense work than you are just fine with the nouveau driver.

Maarten read my mind, lol.

I used Nouveau for 5 years without problems, before getting a laptop with AMD.

Wiz

 

[ML_113]

I watch Netflix, Youtube and play Mplayer on my 2k, 20~yr(?) old 50" LED Samsung so I don't notice any difference - but the installation of the Nvidia driver is so easy on MX, I install it anyway.

 

[Stellaris]

Thanks for taking your time to reply folks.
Helped me to take he final decision.
Marking this as solved.
Thanks again.

 

[osprey]

Thanks for taking your time to reply folks.
Helped me to take he final decision.
Marking this as solved.
Thanks again.

I realise you have marked this as solved, but apparently not considered in relation to the nouveau drivers is the capacity to add video acceleration as outlined here:

VideoAcceleration · freedesktop.org

nouveau.freedesktop.org

Significant improvement to performance can be added to the nouveau driver with the firmware gained through installing the firmware as outlined in the above link if such firmware is missing from your video card. If you run:

 dmesg | grep -i firm

and find that "nv8..." is missing, installing firmware from the link helps improve video.

 

[MikeWalsh]

We of course take the "lateral" approach in Puppy, as in so many other areas.

I bought myself a GeForce GT 710 when I got this new HP Pavilion desktop in January 2020. The very newest drivers no longer support it - I believe the 490-series 64-bit drivers were the last to do so - but the getNvidia utility written by Shinobar of the Japanese Puppy Forum compiles the .run file of your choice 'in-situ'.

If I get any issues with newer Puppies/kernels, I revert to an older kernel (easy to swap with Puppy's modular approach), then obtain the appropriate .run file & run the utility. 99 times out of 100 it will work.

My 32-bit Puppies work fine with the 390-series driver. And the Quadro NVS-135m mobile chip in the recently-acquired Dell Latitude lappie is happy with the 340-series......even with Fossapup64's k5.4.53 kernel. Some Pups I haven't even bothered with the proprietary drivers, and I just stick with the in-kernel 'nouveau' driver instead.

I do some occasional video-editing, but I always use a Puppy equipped with the official drivers for this.

Most of the time, the 'nouveau' driver will do what you want.

(I did have a GT210 myself at one point, but the demented buzzing from that tiny little fan drove me nuts.....hence the 'upgrade' to the GT 710 'passive-cooler'. It pulls a max of just 19W through the slot itself, so isn't particularly hungry.....and of course, the upgrade from Fermi to Kepler gives a big improvement in performance. Not being a gamer, it's not an issue, even so. Believe it or not, not all of us WANT a GPU for gaming.)


Mike.

 

[Stellaris]

I realise you have marked this as solved, but apparently not considered in relation to the nouveau drivers is the capacity to add video acceleration as outlined here:

VideoAcceleration · freedesktop.org

nouveau.freedesktop.org

Significant improvement to performance can be added to the nouveau driver with the firmware gained through installing the firmware as outlined in the above link if such firmware is missing from your video card. If you run:

 dmesg | grep -i firm

and find that "nv8..." is missing, installing firmware from the link helps improve video.

Thank you

 

[Stellaris]

Some Pups

Imagine a non-linux user reading this.

newer Puppies

32-bit Puppies

 

[tohmah]

Nvidia has been a mess with legacy drivers. I had to give up an older machine because neither nouveau or Nvidia's drivers would support it any longer. Puppy still worked. But that's just my gripe with Nvidia. As others have said you should be fine with nouveau. I would stick with that as long as it works.

fwiw now, did you find this for getting legacy drivers to work in newer kernels?

nvidia-legacy : Butterfly

Nvidia-340 and Nvidia-390 legacy driver for newer kernel series. --------------------------------- For Nvidia-340 only Notes for kernel 5.11.x and newer versions: Following lines may need to be added to a configuration file for Nvidia driver to be enabled with the 5.11 update of the kernel...

launchpad.net

 

[kc1di]

fwiw now, did you find this for getting legacy drivers to work in newer kernels?

nvidia-legacy : Butterfly

Nvidia-340 and Nvidia-390 legacy driver for newer kernel series. --------------------------------- For Nvidia-340 only Notes for kernel 5.11.x and newer versions: Following lines may need to be added to a configuration file for Nvidia driver to be enabled with the 5.11 update of the kernel...

launchpad.net

The problems with legacy Nvidia drivers all started a number of years ago when Xorg changed some things and nvidia choose not to update there older drivers. So in linux at the time they were pretty much dead. But glad you found a solution.
Enjoy!