Do I really need Nvidia drivers?
 

I have a basic question: how much will I benefit from installing Nvidia's accelerated drivers for my 6600GT AGP on FC5? As is, I'm using the vesa driver for the video, which seems kind of sluggish in normal internet/word processing/spreadsheet work. I tried the included nv driver but it is worse than the vesa driver, and has other problems (can't connect two monitors, entire screen doesn't show up on my analog monitor).

With this said, should I install the nvidia drivers? I'm a quasi-newbie and have tried to install the nvidia driver over the weekend. It was a crash course in downloading the kernel, compiling, finding missing SDK tools, etc. After a lot of trial and error (and a couple fresh installs of FC5), I got everything to install and tell me it was sucessful...but X wouldn't load. In fact, it wouldn't even load when I reverted to my xorg.conf backup file. I'm not looking for help installing the drivers (yet) but if it will greatly improve performance I'll put in more time and effort to install them. Thanks.

if you're on fc5 then go to livna.org and install the rpm's via their yum repo and it will install fine without any hassle, so generally i'd say there's no point *not* installing them for the sake of it as it's so easy. as for whether you need them... i expect most of what you want can easily be done without them. i used to use a GeForce 4200ti (i think) with dual outputs which i only ever used the nv driver on, not nvidia. with dual heads, you have a number of ways to run multiple screens, especially with nvidia (over ATI i mean). i always ran two seperate screen declarations in my X configuration and joined them at server level, as opposed to using a TwinView widget at the driver level. horses for courses really.

I don't think you can use the nv driver successfully for dual head with a 6600 yet (or tvout for that matter), even with mulitple screens and not twinview(which I would also avoid in favour of mulitple screens). Maybe I'm wrong..

just make sure you don't use version 8774 or earlier, there's been an exploitable vulnerbability for 2 years!

maybe u can try fedora core 6.

Thanks for the responses. I made one last ditch effort to install the nvidia drivers with yum and it worked. Don't know why it worked this time b/c it was the exact same procedure as before. Anyhow, it is a HUGE improvement over the nv and vesa drivers. Now I'm one step closer to eliminating my dependence on products from Microsoft's evil empire...