Is the NVIDIA driver install worth it?

randon · 10-02-2003, 12:18 AM

Hi all,
After reading all of the horror stories about NVIDIA driver installations on these forums I'm not sure if it's worth it to install them at all. I would say at least 75% of the nvidia related threads i have read are bad experiences

, or confusion

. I'm ok without them; is it that much of a difference with them installed? How do I go about doing this anyway? Since i am a SUPER

I'm reluctant to try this because I don't want to mess anything up. I'm using Mandrake 9.1 and It's running great at the moment; no errors and no problems. Such a newbie that I don't have a half a clue what anybody is talking about on these forums as far as terminology, of where I can safely create directories and things like that. I must admit i'm kind of pampered with XP's ease of driver installs, but since I want to eventually ween myself out of windoze I guess I just have to dive in and

and get my feet wet. Any input is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
RANDON

Demonbane · 10-02-2003, 12:27 AM

The main reason I install it is for opengl performance.
If you don't have a problem with the generic Xfree86 nv module then there's no need to install them.

meldroc · 10-02-2003, 02:14 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Demonbane
The main reason I install it is for opengl performance.
If you don't have a problem with the generic Xfree86 nv module then there's no need to install them.

Yep, the NVidia drivers are required for hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics.

Of course, getting NVidia cards working wouldn't be nearly so much of a pain if NVidia open sourced their drivers, or at least released programming information about their cards without requiring an NDA

How much trouble would I get in if I reverse-engineered the drivers?

thegreatgatsby · 10-02-2003, 06:29 AM

Is the NVIDIA driver install worth it?

yes - you'll learn lots about your system. I think it's probably so difficult partly because it's one of the first things people try to do once they start with linux.

Wynd · 10-02-2003, 10:25 AM

My install was smooth as could be. The only problem I had was I needed to download something from the internet or use the kernel source which was also on the internet, and I didn't have network card drivers properly set up at the time so the install failed. But when I got them working, all I had to do was run the installer file, answer yes a few times, and I was good to go, I think it even wrote XF86Config for me. I was actually surprised at how easy it was