Video optimizations, GPU features, CPU integrated encoders, etc

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Nvidia cards are without doubt powerful hardware, but we may miss some of their powerful possibilities due to lack of packages installed by default that can improve them, for example:

  • vdpau: if im not wrong this is a gpu optimized video renderer, playing videos more smooth and without consuming cpu
  • cuda: some gpu calculations used in for example blender
  • optix: (related to cuda), ray tracing optimizations using gpu (if im not wrong)
  • etc...

There can be more packages that can improve things in an installed OS (if you can use your gpu to render videos, why not included by default? it is a must!), or also some video encoding (who don't wants to encode videos much faster featuring gpu or cpu integrated features?)

So, this thread is about a research about packages that can improve installed systems, and of course it is not limited to nvidia but also for intel cards or other possible (common) ones.

Betatestings with results are required to make sure we are including the correct packages

Research starts in 3, 2, 1... :runningfast:

and yes, im working in improving much better the nvidia installer, drivers, features, interactivity, etc... surprises coming soon, so please help improving this :slight_smile:

BTW, use the nvidia drivers from the repos for your tests, I just uploaded much newer ones, actually 390 and 340 has been tested, you must be able to play with them as much as you want having your "apu" updated and playing with the tool:

~ ❯❯❯ sudo nvidia-privative-drivers-install -h

Also, if you do everything from live mode, you won't be hurt in any sense :slight_smile:

Suggested boot extra options for Live mode:

  • select "propietary drivers"
  • press TAB
  • remove "quiet splash" entries
  • add "vga=791" (should work, it will increase your console resolution)
  • add "nox11autologin" (wont autostart the graphical system, so you can play with drivers in console without worries)
  • boot, say "no" to installing nvidia drivers, then you can run the tool yourself later to install them
  • run "apui elive-tools" to have the last version of the tool, then you can use it :slight_smile:
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Hola!

Will go in those new tricks tomorrow!
Note that cuda can be very effective too for massive parallel calculations for anything...
An other thing I begin to see is openCL: parallelization betwin cpu, gpu, and used for nvidia, amd/ati, intel, Blender...

Halo!

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Just to add to your comment... my wife bought an Acer Inspire 3 laptop a couple of weeks ago and in the end she was very disappointed. At first, she didn't want me to install anything on it to keep it hers... But 2 days ago she gave it to me... She doesn't like Win 10 at all, etc...

So... the first thing I did was to install a Stable Linux OS. I already mentioned that Mint is my stable distro for now... but it works very well with Elive 3.8.7 Beta also.

Now, my point is that the driver it needs to be at its best is NVIDIA 435 for a GeForce MX250 graphics card

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This would be grat since the aim is old PCs also. Though also VLC as an hardware acceleration option that works quite well. Is vdpau even better? And would it support amd too?

Oh well… This is definitely "looking forward"... RTX vcards are not so common yet. And again, what about the counter part of amd? There are also AMD vcards for workstations that support real time ray tracing if i'm not mistaken. Why do you dislike AMD this much?

Agreed

AMD? :frowning:

It happened to my dad. He gave his (really cool) 17" sony vaio to my sister because he deeply disliked Windows 10, and stuck with a 2005 Toshiba satellite A110-180 but with linux. He will not change it as long as it run smooth (though i opted for q4os rather than elive, just because it's pretty close to Windows XP look, to which my dad was used).

Elive is quite stable for being a beta i think. I never had a problem with any installation. Ever. I actually find it quite more stable than any ubuntu flavour for example (they often time degrade quite quickly. It looks like at every boot they lose a piece and get a new error!)

The mx250 does not use the latest driver?

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I like your wife already....

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The mx250 does not use the latest driver?

Well, it is what Mint used for it, and the specs look ok.

What is available for a Linux distro for that?

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Looks like the latest supported drivers are the 440.64 on the nvidia website… but honestly i don't know i haven't been using nvidia in years...

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That’s what I just found also after my post. I’ll check more later... ???

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Useless comment from here:
"Never change a winning team" :wink:

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Very useful comment before mine... :sunglasses:

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the actual version of nvidia available in elive 3.8.9 is 440.59-1 (and the last version not yet updated is 440.64-1), so i assume 3.8.9 should work with this card, did you tried it?

because of all the experience that I had with these drivers, I (personally) dislike them, but of course I want to have them supported as much as possible. I can compare that experience similar to the b43 wifi drivers lol

well, things changed in the last time for ati drivers, in fact we don't have privative drivers in debian anymore, this is good and bad, so by one side we should have a much better support (working cards) simply working "out of the box", by other side, seems like some cards are simply not supported anymore

by other side, i simply don't have any hardware to test with, so if you think (since you have amd ati cards) that there's something that can be improved, like a missing package, you are welcome to suggest these changes in order to improve the support in elive :slight_smile:

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Yes, I tried it with 3.8.9 with the 440.59-1 and it works very well with it...

I tried it live and installed. The only detail is that with the Live CD, nothing happens when I click on the Nvidia item to change the settings. It is the same with the apps library. Is it because it was live and not installed on the HDD?

I had to uninstall it to do some changes and am only using the LiveCD for now...

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Honestly, any card i tried was simply working perfectly out of the box. From AGP cards to my newest card (though it's kinda an ugly one, HD 8750!).
Unluckily i will have to upgrade to nvidia sooner or later due to scholar reasons :cry:

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no, that's an issue of cairo-dock, i dont know why it happens... if you run them from the e16 menu it should work without problems