I recently installed mandrake 10.0 official. Reviewing the auto configuration it has detected that my video card is a Nvidia Geforce256, which it is. So everything appears to be good. However I have read otherwise.

On several sites I have been told to fully utilize the card I MUST download the file Nvidia provides on their site and install it to take advantage of the true 3d power of the card. I suspect this to be true because any 3d program I try either runs super slow or not at all.

I wanted to ask on here if this is indeed the case, that I need to do the install. Furthermore, if that is the case, can someone point me in the right direction in how to boot with out the X interface coming up? (VGA mode as well) Nvidia's files must be installed this way. I'm a newbie at this but have already got somewhat comfortable with a command line, compiling and installing gaim from source...

Thanks to you all.

yes you have to install the nvidia drivers to get 3D Accell

easiest way to install is... first download the driver from nvidia

Fire up a terminal..

su
urpmi kernel-source
init 3
sh NVIDIA-whatever-the-file-name-is

follow instructions

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
replace "nv" with "nvidia" and make sure you have load glx at the top. Also at the end of the nvidia install it will give you a path to a doc. Go over that file and it will give you all teh XF86Config options for the nvidia driver.

afterwards run

init 5

this will get you back to that familiar place with 3d accell