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Originally Posted by SameOldStory
I'll look into the NVIDIA drivers soon. When I did my test I used whatever Ubuntu installed, figuring that that would be the best.
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Well, Ubuntu does it's best to emulate Windows install. It tries to figure out what kit you have and set itself up so things Just Work without requiring special knowledge on the part of the user. It does so pretty well, and things generally
do work, but may not work as well as possible, since the default is all open source.
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I stopped playing most games a long time ago. Unfortunately I keep reading that any gaming card will give fast 2D results. So far I haven't seen that on cards that cost less than $200. If someone has a real solid recommendation I might go as high as $130 for a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot. But it has to handle dual monitors.
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What sort of fast 2D do you need? Gaming cards all concentrate on fast
3D results, and 2D comes along for the ride.
I used to run a Matrox G450 AGP card, precisely because it
had dual monitor support. It didn't do hardware accelerated 3D, but I didn't care, as I wasn't playing games. Matrox has a model that supports 3 monitors, beloved of people like stock traders who can have email/IM on one monitor, real time stock price feeds on another, and Excel for analysis on a third.
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I keep seeing "(nonfree) drivers". Is there something undesirable about them, or is it just an ideological thing?
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Ideological. "Non-free" software does
not have source code available. For some folks that's a show stopper, so Ubuntu segregates it in a separate category, and makes it an opt-in install.
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I just spent half an hour looking online & it looks like there's no consensus on a good card. What one likes, the other says has problems.
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Holy War.
For practical purposes, there are two brands of gaming video cards: ATI (part of AMD these days) and Nvidia. There are fanatical supporters of each.
There are an assortment of other video cards out there not aimed at gamers, and a number of machines come with onboard video on the motherboard as default. (My desktop has embedded S3 graphics, which is adequate for what I do.)
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Dennis