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LinuxDig.Com : Linux Review : Nvidia 440 Go and Suse 9.1 64
Author: HumanX | Monday October 11, 2004
The last video card review I did was on an ATI Radeon 8500. That was a couple of years ago, and how times have changed. In this review I will give the Nvidia 440 Go a review on a Compaq R3000 Laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 running Novell Suse 9.1.
Hardware
Compaq R3000 Laptop
Nvidia 440 Go
786 Mem
AMD 64 Athlon 3200
15.4" Monitor (Great Video Response During Unreal Tournament)
Drivers
Being that I am running Suse 9.1 and using YAST to setup this laptop, installing the Nvidia video drivers was easy. Xfree comes with drivers which are fine if you do not want the 3d capabilities, but if you plan for games or 3d art, you need the drivers from Nvidia.
You can download the drivers from Nvidia. The drivers are kernel level and require some compilation to get them going. Drivers are closed source and in effect you compile hooks from the kernel to the binary driver.
After downloading the drivers from Nvidia, just run the installer script and you should be off and running. If not, there is plenty of help on the web which will help you get going.
The only modifications I needed to make for my system was to add some custom screen sizes to the XConfig file. Since 1280x800 is not a normal screen size, this required manual entry.
For those of you who do not know, Nvidia has probably some of the best support when it comes to Linux video drivers.
Performance
Here are some performance settings from an ATI Radeon 8500 I did a couple of years ago http://www.linuxdig.com/news_page/1038239754.php using glxgears.
640x480 : 330 Frames per second
*800x600 : 80-130 Frames per second
*1024x768 : 60-105 frames per second
On the Nvidia, at 1280x700 glxgears was reporting 380-500 frames per second.
Unreal Tournament
During this test I had the oppurtunity to download and play Unreal Tournament 2004 64 Bit. Unreal comes with both the 32 bit and 64 bit version and the installation automatically determines which version is right for your machine.
** This was a first, as I was playing Unreal, I could feel the laptop heat up by probably another 20 degress. This game puts the system to the test!
So how was it? Great! I installed Unreal and played full screen at 800x600 at 32 bit. Game Play was smooth, sharp and just what you would expect from Unreal, except, it was on Linux! Btw, all graphic settings were tweaked to their highest settings.
Do you want to boot Unreal just a little faster? Pull out the trusty hdparm program which you can use to turn DMA on your hard drives, unmask irq's and more.
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