Jumping Ship with Oolite (from Vista to Mint)

[Lone_Wolf]

Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS780 [Radeon HD 3200] bus-ID: 01:05.0
X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: [email protected]
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RS780 GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.0 Direct Rendering: Yes

Some things :
- the driver ati listed suggests you may have remnants of the amd proprietary driver that slow down things
- mesa 10.1.0 is the first of the 10.1.x releases, there have been 6 bugfix releases after that one.

You could ask help on Mint forums to check out the first issue, and also how to upgrade to mesa 10.1.6 .

About a new card :
if you go nvidia , use the proprietary drivers. nouveau (nividia opensource driver) still lacks many features / performance.

Your processor seems a bit old (2008/2009 ? ), if you go for a recent videocard it's likely the processor will become the main bottleneck, preventing you from using the new videocard effectively.

Unless you intend to put the videocard in a new system in the near future, I'm inclined to suggest you look for a card that's a few years old.
for amd cards a card in the HD6xxx / HD7xxxx (Southern Islands chipset) range should bring lots of improvement without the cpu becoming a big bottleneck.

sorry, can't help with nividia card types.

[Smivs]

Re graphics cards, I use an Nvidia GTX550ti based card, which is quite old now but is very good. Perhaps if a good used one comes up on ebay? I use the proprietary drivers, which are definitely better than nouveau as LW says.

[Ranthe]

Well I've just splashed out and installed a new graphics card - an NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 - and after running Driver Manager and getting the recommended driver I'm now getting 60FPS frame rates in Oolite 1.80 in Mint 17.1 with "Extra Detail" enabled... running under Cinnamon!

Code: Select all

System:    Host: Vixen-IV-L Kernel: 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.2) 
           Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca
Machine:   Mobo: Gigabyte model: GA-MA78GM-S2H version: x.x Bios: Award version: F5 date: 06/18/2008
CPU:       Dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (-MCP-) cache: 1024 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 svm) bmips: 4008.26 
           Clock Speeds: 1: 1000.00 MHz 2: 1000.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GF119 [GeForce GT 610] bus-ID: 01:00.0 
           X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) Resolution: [email protected] 
           GLX Renderer: GeForce GT 610/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 331.113 Direct Rendering: Yes

I've never seen the BGS witchspace rings look as awesome as they do now, and everything seems to run smooth as silk

Oh happy day!

[Amah]

welcome here on the other side of the windows and the walled fruit gardens.

[davcefai]

I'm late to this discussion but my 2p worth on AMD cards is

Forget them

Their proprietary graphics drivers stink. Their support is at the same level as Rome Airport's lost luggage department. I have wasted countless hours trying to get the onboard graphics of a new system to perform. (a 4-core 6800K chip).

Ditto for a couple of older cards in the past. A 610 Nvidia card was the quick and effective fix. I get 75fps with 80 OXPs installed during a battle in Thargoid space.

[Lone_Wolf]

Davcefai,

you are aware that when using opensource drivers the situation is completely reversed ?

the nouveau opensource drivers for nvidia are a lot worse then opensource radeon drivers, and the radeon drivers have gained much ground on amd proprietary drivers.

Also there are reports that a big part of problems with amd cards comes from combining intel motherboard/chipsets and amd cards.
Very often the amd card/driver that gives problems on intel-based systems works much better on systems with non-intel chipsets.

[davcefai]

Lone_Wolf

I agree that the Nouveau driver still needs a lot of work. I've had problems with both the open source and ATI_Radeon drivers.

This was on an all AMD machine, ie AMD chipset and AMD CPU.