Ah. Apologies for my mistake. I failed to take into account that the error message came from the Slackbuild driver, which is apparently in this case the most accurate, rather than a direct NVIDIAxxxxx.run install. So let us know, cmk77, how goes the battle?


PS Reaper, did you mean to say that the 304 driver from Slackbuilds is somehow different from 304 on the nVidia site? Explain please.

Well, according to this page I need the 304.117 legacy driver to support my GeForce 7300 GT. No problem with the install (without slackbuilds, just by running the installer) and it's working fine so far. The main advantage is that the nvidia-xconfig created a very clean xorg.conf that didn't need any editing. Overall, nouveau took me more effort to setup than nvidia. I don't see much performance improvement though in daily use. For example, glxgears gives 60FPS for both nouveau and nvidia; full-screen viewing of flash movies takes 60%CPU (core i7 920) for the flashplugin, 13% for X and 10% for firefox.

glxgears is a very bad benchmark and nowadays mostly tests the CPU. That both drivers only get 60FPS is because the drivers sync their output to the screen refresh rate.

@cmk77 - Not only should the nvidia driver be more stable and somewhat faster on the desktop (and don't confuse cpu requirements with gpu requirements) but the nvidia driver will handle higher resolution movies and will do real 3D Acceleration. This is not just important for games anymore since web business likes to make webpages glitzy attention grabbers requiring ever more gpu "horsepower".

If you don't play games or watch movies, you're still better off with the manufacturer's driver. If you have any doubts try running this benchmark with each driver. It will just crush nouveau... probably won't even load the start page.

Heaven 3 There is a Heaven 4 but I doubt a 7300 will run that with any driver.

Running any benchmarks on the 7300GT is meaningless, since it is neither a gaming nor a multimedia card, this is a card meant for office use. If you get 2FPS with the Nvidia driver or 1FPS with the nouveau driver on a benchmark using a heavyweight gaming engine is for the intended purpose not relevant. Even video acceleration will not be much better with the Nvidia driver, since the acceleration architecture they use currently, VDPAU, is not supported on that card by either driver.

The 304.117s are an update for the latest kernel 3.10.x and xorg-server release 1.15. Since these are available, I'd recommend using them rather than the 304.108s.

Just goes to show ya, corporations play funny games with numbers..... that, and the old adage about what happens when we assume is still true LOL. I assumed a 7300 was, for example, an improvement over a 6800, which at one time was quite the gaming monster. Nope. The 7800 series is the successor to the 6800 series. So, while nvidia says the 7300 GT can be used for light gaming, Toby is right, even Heaven 3 will bring that card weeping to it's knees, with either driver, since the 7300 came out after "light gaming" was redefined by progress.

It comes down how you define light gaming. Back in the days I used this card for a while (due to my main card being defective) and it ran Neverwinter Nights (one of my all time favorites) in 1280x1024 with maximum settings and anti-aliasing quite fine. Even some newer games (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty 1 and 2) could be played with a reasonable framerate.

Regarding the version numbers, at that time it was usual that you get the same performance in the new series if you get one class down. For example, the 6800GT was about as fast as the 7600GT or later the 8500GT. I am not quite sure if this is still the case, though.