[LAU] Ubuntu-Studio 13.04 Nvidia drivers?

[John Murphy]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2013 10:43:50 +0100, Kaj Ailomaa wrote:
> 
> First, ask yourself, if you really need proprietary drivers (and I can't
> really speak for the reasons to why you should or should not need them).
> The free drivers have in fact become more or less fully functional, so you  
> might not need the proprietary ones. I was even using the free drivers  
> playing steam games recently (all though, not problem free).

I wanted to get away from dual booting (Win7) to run a racing sim and
found SpeedDreams on Linux really quite good. I haven't tried it with
Nouveau drivers yet, but I don't expect it to be as good, if it works
at all. The nvidia 310 driver is particularly good, I find, and hardly
stretches my GPU while (playing) driving.

> This is not a desktop problem at all. So, it doesn't matter if you're  
> using XFCE, KDE
> or Gnome. The only two things that are involved is the kernel (and  
> associated libraries and tools), and the driver.
> 
> to build the nvidia kernel module you need the headers for the kernel you  
> are running, but that should take care of itself when you install  
> something like nvidia-304. Make sure you are running the kernel you are  
> intending to build the module for, before proceeding.
> Also, move your xorg.conf, if you have one.

Thanks for that. The distro is pretty cutting edge at 13.04, so I
thought there could have been some problem caused by its newness lol.

> There's the method of using Software Sources (software-properties-gtk),
> under the tab "Additional Drivers", where you can select a number of
> options.
> You get the same result when installing from the terminal. All I did was  
> "sudo apt-get install nvidia-304". This was on "3.8.0-6-lowlatency".  
> There's always the chance that previous kernels did not work well with the  
> proprietary drivers.

Yes I found that tab in the 'software and updates' dialog. Thank you.
The 310 driver is well worth trying, if you haven't already. It is
said to double the performance over 304:

"Comparing 304.51 driver performance of 142.7 fps versus 310.14 driver
performance of 301.4 fps in beta build of Left for Dead 2. All tests
run on the same system using Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz with 8 GB
memory, GeForce GTX 680 and Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit."

http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/NVIDIA-Delivers-Massive-Performance-Boost-to-Linux-Gaming-8ac.aspx

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