Are my video drivers installed properly?

preiter · 02-06-2004, 12:45 PM

I recently installed Mandrake 9.2 in my computer. This computer has an NVidia GeForce3 Ti200 installed. The Mandrake installation process correctly identified the card, making me think that the proper video drivers are already in use.

Everything seems to be working so far just fine, but...

I started up TuxRacer and it ran like a slideshow. I have an AthlonXP1700 and 500MB of DDR in this machine. There should be plenty of power for this game. This makes me wonder if the 3d accelleration in my video card is being used.

Do I need to DL drivers from NVidia and install them? Or is there some other step I missed to enable 3d graphics accelleration?

CoolAJ86 · 02-06-2004, 03:33 PM

Get the NVidia drivers and install them. Be careful to read the instructions carefully or you won't be able to boot into X. Once you have the nvidia drivers installed, you should notice significant improvement.

t3___ · 02-06-2004, 05:12 PM

I remember reading something in the recent SUSE release notes that indicated that Nvidia was not allowing anything but the most basic/stripped version of thier drivers. they want you to visit thier website and download...

CoolAJ86 · 02-06-2004, 06:35 PM

The NVidia drivers from the site worked alright for me (or at least I noticed that my screen savers stopped looking like slideshows - I don't game much).

What I read said that they stripped the RPM functionality and made it a bin so that it was compat with more distros.

Seems similar enough to the one and Windows - that is to say that with the latest drivers I get a 25% white / 75% black screen when booting into the windows or X gui, and with the old drivers that didn't happen. Considering that and the file size, I think they include similar functionality for either OS.

I'll try TuxRacer myself sometime and tell you the results.

shane25119 · 02-06-2004, 09:37 PM

nvidia drivers are a pain to work with.......... bottom line

CoolAJ86 · 02-06-2004, 09:42 PM

The first time I ever used linux, the first thing I did was install the nvidia driver. Aside from the half second 25/75 white/black screen before booting into the GUI, and a little delving into configuration files as per the instructions, it worked fine for me.

Do you have a non-official open source nvidia driver to sugest that works better? an rpm maybe? I haven't looked into it, but if you use a different module and it works well, give us a link.