LM17 and Cinnamon 2.2 recommended Graphics Card

[Nightflame]

I have just updated my system to LM17 Cinnamon 2.2 using the motherboard Radeon HD 4290 graphics card performance is poor. This HD4290 is no longer supported by AMD. HD Video is not too bad, but scrolling through Libre Office docs is painful, and I get about 15fps with 10 fishes on the MicroSoft HTML5 fishes test. My Chromebook does better than this!

The rest of the system looks like this:

Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H 890GX Socket AM3 HDMI DVI VGA Out 8 Channel Audio (Radeon HD 4290) ATX Motherboard.
AMD Phenom II X4 (Quad Core) 840 Socket AM3 3.2GHz 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor.
Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz Memory Kit Unbuffered CL9.
Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz XMS 3 Memory.
Samsung 840 Series 120Gb SSD.

I know this kit is pretty old but it should not struggle running Linux Mint 17?

My question is what is a recommended graphics card that will give me excellent LM 17 desktop performance. I am not interested in gaming, just a slick and smooth desktop for Libre Office, HD Videos, and browsing experience.

Linux Mint simply recommends a graphics card capable of 1024×768 which my HD 4290 is capable of, but its not cutting it. Any recommendations?

[konjad]

Have you installed propetriary drivers? AMD's open-source ones are terrible.

[Nightflame]

> Have you installed propetriary drivers? AMD's open-source ones are terrible.

No because the AMD propetriary drivers for HD 4290 do not support Xorg > 1.13. LM17 + Cinnamon 2.2 uses Xorg 1.15. Basically the HD 4290 is now classed as legacy and AMD will no longer update the drivers. Therefore I need to replace the HD4290. I do not want to change my motherboard so adding a new dedicated graphics card seemed the simplest option. I am just looking for a recommendation of a graphics card for a great desktop experience without going overboard on an insane card for 3D gaming which I do not need. I need a card I can buy new in the market today that will hopefully last the lifetime of LM17.

-S.

[altae]

I would go for a Nvidia card. Any halfway decent card of the current series (700) should do the trick.

[bob1000]

> I would go for a Nvidia card. Any halfway decent card of the current series (700) should do the trick.

Wow thats a £100+ card just to run a desktop. When did Linux get so bloated?

I was watching this thread hoping for some advice as well. Hoping something less expensive, say in the Nvidia 600 range would suffice. What are other non-gaming folk running on Mint 17 with Cinnamon?

Bob.

[konjad]

What about open-source drivers? Are they too unoptimized? Don't spend 100 pounds on a GPU if you don't play games nor do any 3D rendering, for that price you might as well get a cheap new motherboard + CPU with integrated GPU to run flawlessly and it's a better option than buying a modern GPU for an outdated hardware.

[wayne128]

Before you consider to give up your HD4000 series card, take a look at what I had,
an old rig, gigabyte ga-ep45 motherboard, Pentium E5200, HD3600 ( older I think), but see what is the result after installing legacy fglrx.
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 40#p868673
Of course I have to use older distros that still support this legacy card.
and when idling, it drain a lot less power than the radeon driver and thus it run much cooler, something like 15degC cooler.

[Nightflame]

Hmmm, my hardware is only 3 three years old, I do not know what other peoples refresh cycle is but all the rest of the kit, 12Gb RAM, SSD, Quad Core processor seem to still be up to the job. Its just the onboard graphics is not. Opensource drivers do not give hardware acceleration for my card and in practice perormance is poor. AMD has dropped support for Xorg > 1.13 for legacy graphics cards.

I also had hoped by adding a cheapish graphics card I could enjoy Linux Mint 17 desktop, but according to posts here I need a pretty expensive/high end graphics card just to run the desktop. Damn.

[konjad]

Why will you not consider using open source drivers? That way you won't have to spend any money at all. After all you, as you say, don't need high performance from GPU, so even unoptimized drivers should do.

[Nightflame]

> Why will you not consider using open source drivers? That way you won't have to spend any money at all. After all you, as you say, don't need high performance from GPU, so even unoptimized drivers should do.

I am a bit confused here. When I install Linux Mint 17 doesn't it install the Opensource drivers? Because it cannot use the AMD drivers because they do not support Xorg > 1.13 and there are no proprietary drivers listed in "Driver Manager".

# lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3 | grep 'in use'
Kernel driver in use: radeon

# lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RS880 [Radeon HD 4290] [1002:9714]
Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:d000]
Kernel driver in use: radeon
01:05.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RS880 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4200 Series] [1002:970f]

# lshw -c video
PCI (sysfs)

*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: RS880 [Radeon HD 4290]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 5
bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
resources: irq:18 memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:ee00(size=256) memory:fdee0000-fdeeffff memory:fdd00000-fddfffff

# inxi -Fx
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS880 [Radeon HD 4290] bus-ID: 01:05.0
X.org: 1.15.1 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) tty size: 80x24 Advanced Data: N/A for root

So am I using an OpenSource driver? If not which one should I try and how to install?

Thanks.

[Mark Phelps]

So am I using an OpenSource driver?

Yes ... you are using the open source Radeon driver.

When folks mention AMD drivers, they generally mean the restricted AMD drivers -- which you correctly pointed out won't work with your card. You would have to go back to Mint 13 to find an X-server version old enough to work with those AMD drivers.

I had an AMD 4290 when I was using Mint 16 and found I had to mess around with boot parms of "xforcevesa" and "nomodeset" in order to get full resolution out of the Radeon drivers. Perhaps with Mint 17, the Radeon drivers have improved -- don't know, as I'm not using the AMD 4290 anymore.

[Nightflame]

Thanks for clearing that up.

So in summary I am using the OpenSource drivers for my on board Radeon HD 4290 and they are not good enough. AMD does not support Xorg > 1.13 so no restricted drivers available.

I am using LM17 and Cinnamon 2.2 and would like to purchase a graphics card which will give me a great desktop experience. Fast scrolling large Libe Office docs, and browsing. 3D gaming not required.

So far the recommendation has been a Nvidia mid 700 series graphics card which I find a bit expensive. Is anyone using LM17 and Cinnamon 2.2 with a Nvidia 600 series card, or slightly less expensive graphic card? If so what?

Thanks.

[roblm]

I like using inexpensive, fanless Nvidia video cards. The Nvidia GeForce 210 has worked fine for me in Mint 14 through 17
($38 including shipping at Newegg).
I plan on building a new system soon and will use either a GeForce GT 610 ($46 or $36 after rebate), or a GeForce GT 630
($63 or $53 after rebate).

Here's a chart comparing performance:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html

[Nightflame]

In the end I bought an ASUS GeForce 630 2Gb graphics card and installed the nVidia drivers.

This seems to have turned out to be a waste of time and money.

Scrolling through large Libre Write docs with graphics is still slow with screen redraw.

VLC even with hardware acceleration enabled hits the main CPUs.

Microsoft fishes browser test gives me 5 to 10 fps with 10 fishes in Chrome and Firefox.

Am I missing something? Are there some other config options I need to enable?

[Nightflame]

> VLC even with hardware acceleration enabled hits the main CPUs.

I'll answer my own question about VLC here.

Apparently I needed to install some extra packages:

apt-get install libvdpau1 vdpau-va-driver

Then when I run VLC with some debug:

vlc --verbose 2 test.mp4

I get HW Acceleration in the logs:

[0x7f02bd3ecfb8] avcodec decoder debug: Available decoder output format 53 (vaapi_vld)
[0x7f02bd3ecfb8] avcodec decoder: Using VA API version 0.35 for hardware decoding.

And System Monitor shows the CPUs under slightly less stress.

Just need to fix repainting in Libre Office, and Browsers now...

[Nightflame]

> Just need to fix repainting in Libre Office, and Browsers now...

Firefox, follow https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1394765

export MOZ_USE_OMTC=1
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled = true
layers.acceleration.force-enabled = true

And I get:

Driver Version 4.4.0 NVIDIA 331.38
GPU Accelerated Windows 1/1 OpenGL (OMTC)

Microsoft Fishes runs at 17fps! Whoa an increase of 10fps, but still half of what my Chromebook can do.

For Chrome browser tried lots of settings and best I could achive was:

Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled.
3D CSS: Hardware accelerated
Compositing: Hardware accelerated on all pages and threaded
CSS Animation: Accelerated and threaded
Flash 3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
Video: Hardware accelerated
Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
Video Encode: Hardware accelerated
WebGL: Hardware accelerated

Oh dear:

Canvas: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled.

Microsoft Fishes runs at 5fps.

I'll just have to see how this translates into real world browsing experience.

[Nightflame]

> I'll just have to see how this translates into real world browsing experience.

In practice the browsers are slower using hardware acceleration.

Also VLC crashes on files which play fine using software decoding:

0x7fed4cc38b58] avcodec decoder: Using VA API version 0.35 for hardware decoding.
*** Error in `vlc': free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x00007fed404554f0 ***
Aborted

So all in all a dedicated quad core 2Gb graphics card with proprietary drivers turned out to be no better than an onboard legacy card with opensource free drivers for Linux Mint 17.

[bob1000]

> So all in all a dedicated quad core 2Gb graphics card with proprietary drivers turned out to be no better than an onboard legacy card with opensource free drivers for Linux Mint 17.

It should have given you a clue that when only two people in the whole of official Linux Mint forum replied with Graphics Card suggestions that you were on to a loser!

There are good reasons why Firefox and Chrome disable hardware accleration in Linux by default.

A dedicated Quad core Geforce 630 with 2GB RAM might make a difference in Windows, but on Linux Desktop forget it. Drivers and support are just not there, best to buy the biggest main CPU you can and try to let that render stuff for you. The days of a Linux desktop working on an older lower specced computer are over. Unless maybe you go for XFCE.