Nvidia users: Do you use the Free or the proprietary driver?

[dust hill resident]

Nvidia users, Do you use the Free/open source driver, or the proprietary one?

I've been using Nvidia cards since 2006, and up until a few days ago I had been using the proprietary drivers. This month I started having problems with suspend, and Nvidia's driver seemed to be the cause. So I decided to try the nouveau driver for the first time, and it's working well.
I have noticed that the performance isn't as good (lower framerates in minecraft for example), but it's certainly working well enough for my needs.

What have your experiences been?

[roseway]

I use the proprietary driver at present, but not because I really need it. A recent conflict with Flash (people with blue faces) has made me consider again changing over to nouveau.

[Bulkley]

Over many years I have gone through several video cards, Nvidia, ATI, whatever. A few years back I got fed up with proprietary drivers; they caused me too much trouble. I no longer use them. I'm sure there have been improvements but watching threads on this forum tells me that proprietary drivers are still problematic. The only advantage I can imagine of proprietary drivers is a slight edge when playing some 3D games.

[julian516]

Nouveau is gaining ground, I think. At this point nVidia still seems to give me a more reliable power-management, especially with regard to suspend-resume. If I am typing my nVidia driver seems to write to the screen more quickly than the Nouveau.

But the difference is not so dramatic as it was two years ago. At this point if the installation of the nVidia driver is not straight-forward or that driver causes problems I would go over to the Nouveau version.

[dark_stang]

I only use the nVidia proprietary driver. I think Nouveau is making progress, but it has a way to go before I can actually use it.

[dasein]

^^ What he said.

Although I have to admit that I've quit "tracking" nouveau's progress, which seems painfully slow. It's been what... four years now? And it's still not-quite-ready-for-primtime

[pendrachken]

Over many years I have gone through several video cards, Nvidia, ATI, whatever. A few years back I got fed up with proprietary drivers; they caused me too much trouble. I no longer use them. I'm sure there have been improvements but watching threads on this forum tells me that proprietary drivers are still problematic. The only advantage I can imagine of proprietary drivers is a slight edge when playing some 3D games.

And VDPAU, playing 1080P x.264 content @1-5% CPU is awesome.

[mystika1]

I have been using Nouveau for several months now with no issues. I am not a gamer though, but I do stream tv and movies over the net. I have no plans to change.

Penny

[nomko]

I always use the x-swat ppa for Nvidia drivers. Always worked very well.

[Pablo_Esc]

Proprietary, because using nouveau results in more heating from the GPU in my laptop.
If it was on pair I'd be using nouveau as the 3d speed is not my priority.

[jezzivi]

Code: Select all

Proprietary, because using nouveau results in more heating from the GPU ...

+1

[Tadeas]

Proprietary, because it works

[dilberts_left_nut]

I always use the x-twat ppa

[otegotrician]

When nouveau can run GoogleEarth as well as the nVidia drivers, I will jump ship faster than the passengers on the Titanic.

[woteb]

Nouveau on my Acer Aspire 9300, recent got from a friend. Last I tried Mepis 11 on that laptop with the Nvidia drivers but I got a moving stripes of about 2 pixels on the top of the screen and any window of an open programm wich I couldn't remove. With Nouveau no problems with the screen and no stripes at all.
My only problem is that I only get a 32 bit Debian (+ Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE) working on that laptop and no 64 bit. Then Nouveau is the problem.

[phenest]

Proprietary.

I haven't got a problem with closed source drivers. So long as they work well, and nVidia do provide excellent drivers. My ancient 7950GTX kicks ass with their drivers playing games such as Sauerbraten (over 120 fps in HD).

[62chevy]

Nvidia. Stable has the 295.49 driver installed with the nvidia installer. The upgrade to Wheezy I'll convert to DKMS to make updates easier. Sid with KDE uses DKMS but not on my Sid with Gnome that has the 302.07 drivers.

My router uses the nouveau drivers.

[adenukolnis]

I have never used the nvidia drivers....

of course I only had one nvidia video (4000?) card and I only used it for a while to run the 'television' anyway....

[mmix]

my 2nd old com has nvidia, and always get trouble with nouveau.
so i am using nvdia driver from nvida.com.

my main com has intel onboard vga.

[Gunman1982]

Brothers laptop: nvidia since nouveau seems to be unable to control the GPU fan which results in an overheated emergency poweroff after 5-10 minutes of use.
Other brothers laptop: uses nvidia since he actually wants to be able to play some 3d games.
My Laptop: nvidia since I game a lot and fiddle around with cuda. Have to use the "experimental" 304.22 driver though since the ones in SID sometimes freeze (probably the hang on opengl.fork which is allegedly fixed in 304.22). Hard to reproduce that freezes though since it only happened for me with 2 games in wine after variable timespans and one time while playing that strange java game where you swing a pickaxe.