I've been using an old Mac Book Pro to test out Mint (I'm on 19.3), and it looks like it can do most everything I need to do. I'm thinking of building a PC. One of the uses is building statistical models/data science.
The choice of video cards is a little bit of a quandary.
AMD: has open source drivers that should be included in the distro, so it should just work
nvidia: probably won't have drivers bundled with the distro and will have to install it manually.
For this reason I'm leaning toward AMD. I don't intend to do gaming, so game performance is irrelevant. However, I would like to take advantage of the GPU for doing neural networks. It seems nvidia has the advantage there.
So I'm wondering if I can use AMD for the display, and maybe later add a nvidia card for training networks. How difficult is it to get linux to support 2 video cards? And 2 different types?
2 Video cards?
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lazarus_long
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2 Video cards?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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Moonstone Man
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Re: 2 Video cards?
Some of your assumptions are just wrong so you've led yourself to an incorrect conclusion, and are now posing an XY problem. The nVidia driver is a few clicks away from inside the Linux Mint driver manager. It isn't necessary to have two video cards. If you need nVidia for its CUDA cores and neural network capabilities then just go straight there and forget about AMD.lazarus_long wrote: ⤴Thu Jun 24, 2021 3:38 pm So I'm wondering if I can use AMD for the display, and maybe later add a nvidia card for training networks.
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lazarus_long
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Re: 2 Video cards?
Is the included nvidia driver the proprietary or the open source version? I've read the nvidia open source driver is not well regarded.
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Moonstone Man
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Re: 2 Video cards?
Both are available. The open source driver is part of the kernel so it's installed by default. These days there's nothing much wrong with the open source driver. It's improved quite a bit but it affords no control whatsoever over the video card. At least now it's able to drive a video card sufficiently to prevent tearing. What one you use is up to you.lazarus_long wrote: ⤴Thu Jun 24, 2021 7:40 pm Is the included nvidia driver the proprietary or the open source version? I've read the nvidia open source driver is not well regarded.