Looking for an open source driver based stable GPU

devsk

I am getting sick of nouveau crashing my Firefox or X every now and then on my oldish GeForce 750 Ti (which actually is good enough to play 4K60p content if not for nouveau hangs).

I am looking for a GPU (amd or nvidia, does not matter) which works (at least hardware accelerated 4K60p for h264) with the open source drivers and does not crash on a daily basis. Budget: like 750 Ti, between 100-150$. What are people on gentoo using these days which they found stable for daily use?

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2020 2:04 am Post subject:

I've found a lot of off brand video cards tend to die early, may need to try looking for a board manufactured by some non fly by night company and it'll do better.

I've been using my ancient Radeon HD 5770 for many years, knock on wood, and no real issues yet with it. It's Diamond branded, they were making cards for a long while. The Sapphire branded (IIRC) Radeon HD 3650 that I had prior to this board died an early death.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

devsk · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2020 6:04 am Post subject:

The crash I get shows up like this:

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2020 8:57 am Post subject:

I don't have any recent nvidia cards, I had a 8400GS at one point and don't recall seeing errors with nouveau. Then again it was a fairly "new" (in terms of power on hours, not "latest and greatest" in any sense) card.

I've some older nvidia cards that have issues with nouveau, so hard to say -- need to rule out hardware trouble.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

Logicien · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2020 1:16 pm Post subject:

I have an Nvidia

ZOTAC GT610 SYNERGY EDITION 2GB 64BIT DDR3

I use it from time to time with nouveau. It have never freeze. It's the only one from Nvidia that I had who have never freeze. All the others I had have freeze.

I think that Nouveau have been developped in reverse engineering and have a less performing rate than the Intel and Radeon drivers. I have an

[AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]

1GB of ram that I use with radeon and it perform better than my Nvidia with nouveau in FPS with glxgears. I have an

Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530

who perform the best with the driver i915 from Intel. For big performances I think that the close drivers are needed with Nvidia.
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Paul

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Anything from AMD that's at least 1 major generation out of date should be a safe bet.

I'm using a RX550, the driver was bad when it was new 3 years ago but now everything works well. It should be at the low end of that price range by now, and handles 4k60 h264 and h265 (plus encoding). No VP9/AV1 though, and those seem to be growing in marketshare rapidly.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9360

Talking in general, I have a bunch of older systems with AMD iGPUs that work really well. When last year I bought my first dedicated GPU in a long time, an RX 5700, it was really the same story right from the start, no problems, decent performance, and that was latest gen at the time. Even though I barely use that much performance, I chose it because of superb idle consumption which is way better than with the smallish RX 5xx series. It should be similar for the cheaper 5500 and 5600 cards.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2020 4:34 pm Post subject:

Also on the note of failing drivers, I had a i965 chipset graphics board that kept on crashing with graphics errors with the Intel drivers. Then I swapped the motherboard and all the problems went away... showing that there can be problems with chipset graphics too, it's not just software.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

devsk · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2020 7:40 am Post subject:

Why can't I find decent older (2019) cards for cheap at this time in US? The graphics cards seem to be more expensive than 8-9 months ago. And pretty much all searches on Amazon are $200+.

I am not into gaming but I would like to watch a movie in 4K60p once in a while without tearing or lock ups. I thought I could do this with a $100 Radeon card.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

devsk · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2020 8:38 am Post subject:

I am back-ordered on https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0899TDHRC - a 4GB RX550 which should be plenty for my use case

Anybody has some guidance on what all the use flags and video card entry I need to enable to use hardware acceleration on this card? It seems to have both h264 and h265. Eventually, I may use it for trancoding also to serve my TV which is slightly oldish.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9360