3

Okay a guy on a forum told me that its issues installing the drivers for the 970. Can anyone confirm that its doable from additional drivers?

Also is the 290 easier to deal with? (except drivers being awful?)

6
  • What is 290? Is it Nvidia model?
    – Pilot6
    May 30, 2015 at 7:00
  • If it is AMD, then GTX 970 is a much better choice for Ubuntu.
    – Pilot6
    May 30, 2015 at 8:12
  • I need to know if I should get a R9 290 or a GTX 970 for Ubuntu! :D
    – KMJ1992
    May 30, 2015 at 8:38
  • 1
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it asks for hardware recommendations. Answers to such questoins usually have a very short time of validity.
    – guntbert
    May 31, 2015 at 10:31
  • Why? I need a GPU for Ubuntu... Can anyone tell me if the 970 will work out of the box without a CPU iGPU or not?
    – KMJ1992
    May 31, 2015 at 14:28

1 Answer 1

1

Searching for the driver for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 graphics card at the official NVIDIA website returns the following results.

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The latest driver available at the official NVIDIA website is the recommended driver for this graphics card. The best choice of drivers for this graphics cards from the Ubuntu repositories is the nvidia-331 graphics card driver which is the latest tested NVIDIA proprietary graphics card driver in Ubuntu 14.04. nvidia-331-updates is a more recent graphics driver in Ubuntu 14.04, but it is not called tested in the Additional Drivers utility.

To be sure that this is the correct driver for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, open the terminal and type:

ubuntu-drivers devices  

The results of this command will show a list of drivers and the NVIDIA driver with Recommended appearing after it is the correct driver to install. The Recommended NVIDIA graphics driver from the Ubuntu Software Center is the best driver to install because it is the most stable and reliable driver available from anywhere, and the small incremental performance enhancements that may be possible to achieve from bumping up to the latest graphics driver are not worth the risk of making Ubuntu less stable.

Is the 290 easier to deal with?

If you want to get a specific answer to this question, you need to provide the full name and model number of the graphics card, because AMD also makes a graphics card called AMD Radeon R9 290 and I need to know the full name and model number of the graphics card to search for the correct driver. NVIDIA usually releases graphics card driver updates faster than AMD, but since both cards were launched about one year ago I don't think this would make any difference in Ubuntu 14.04.

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  • msi.com/product/vga/R9-290-GAMING-4G.html#hero-overview You will most likely find it here?
    – KMJ1992
    May 30, 2015 at 8:31
  • That's a scary graphics card, big and power-hungry with 4GB built-in graphics memory suitable for a computer with >=8GB RAM. You probably need to go with the latest proprietary graphics card driver from the official AMD website for best results, although I know that it will also work with fglrx driver from the Ubuntu Software Center.
    – karel
    May 30, 2015 at 8:34
  • Which will give best performance? Also will it be stuck at 50fps like Phoronix benchmarks were saying or have that been fixed?
    – KMJ1992
    May 30, 2015 at 8:40
  • Performance isn't as important a consideration to me as stability when comparing two beast graphics cards, so I'd punk out and choose the more stable card.
    – karel
    May 30, 2015 at 8:48
  • Which is more stable? :O
    – KMJ1992
    May 30, 2015 at 8:54

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