HI all,
I have a question that may be asked multiple times. In short, what graphics card is best used for Fedora.
But a bit more indepth:
My current graphics card is an oldie NVIDIA Geforce GT218
I run Fedora 35 with Wayland drivers, as I understood the current drivers have been improved.
Frankly I think my problems are due to too little video memory on the gpu.
The rest of my system is much newer, based on an AMD Ryzen 5 and 16 GB ram, with a dual monitor setup.
The problem is when I am employing both monitors for some time (like 30 minutes) the screen starts to flicker, and after some time my machine freezes (or becomes insanely slow).
As I strongly believe the graphics card is the main trouble-causer, I am looking into a new one. Preferably a dual-hdmi one. (I cannot daisy chain, as 1 of the monitors does not support daisy chaining)
I’m using a similar old Nvidia card (with 0.5 GB video ram) with two displays, each at 1620x2880 (portrait mode) resolution. With the current software (Nvidia 340 driver, X11, Fedora 35) it is not totally problem free, but close.
I expect you are using the nouveau driver and getting better results from it than I had. It caused my system to lock up a lot sooner than 30 minutes of ordinary use.
I forget exactly what it took to get the Nvidia 340 driver installed. The ordinary process from Nvidia did not work. I found the fix for that in some Fedora forum, but I forget where. I think you should use that driver unless/until you change cards.
If you can’t find how to install the Nvidia driver, ask again and I’ll try to remember the google search I did for finding those instructions.
Also, I was never even able to log in when choosing Wayland. X11 works fine for me.
If one of your monitors supports daisy chaining, isn’t that enough? The last monitor in a daisy chain doesn’t need to support it.
On the other hand, my own experience with daisy chaining was not ultimately successful: On Windows, with a Radeon card that drives 4 displays directly, I wanted to use 4 displays but two of them were too far from the computer for the cables I had. So I tried daisy chaining. If I booted and logged into Windows with just one display powered up, I could turn on the remaining displays in a sequence that made them all work. I even borrowed two more from another computer and got all six to work at once. But if more than one display was powered up when I booted or when I logged in or when it woke up from sleep (even if daisy chained displays were not powered up) the entire display system failed and nothing could be done before powering the whole computer off. Since careful sequential power up of displays was too much of a pain, I bought some longer cables and now use 4 displays directly.
I booted Fedora 35 several times from usb on that same hardware. Sometimes all four displays work and sometimes fewer and I don’t understand any pattern to that behavior. But as it stands Fedora 35 doesn’t support that as well as Windows does. So I won’t look up that exact model of card and suggest it (plus it now costs 2.5 times what I paid for it).
Thanks a lot for your answer. This opens multiple possibilities for me.
I guess I also have some bookmark of a page that explains how to install another driver.
I’ll give it a try.
As one of my (two) monitors does support daisy chaining, this also might be an option. I never look to deep into that technology.
This will keep me playing for a bit. One way or the other must work. So thanks a lot.
As I understand it, general instructions for installing “another driver” would not be relevant at all.
The closed source Nvidia drivers for old Nvidia chip sets are a very special case. They originally had their own weird install process (.run files you can download from the Nvidia website). But IIUC, around last Oct, the Linux kernel changed in a way that broke all the Nvidia closed source drivers, then Nvidia fixed that only for drivers for newer chipsets, then some Fedora developer created a fix for the Nvidia drivers for older chipsets.
You can enable the rpmfusion repo following the instructions here. https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
Then install the nvidia 340 driver from there with sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia*340*
The better fix though is to get a newer card that is supported by the latest nvidia drivers.
Once you have the newer card you can upgrade the nvidia driver with another simple dnf command. sudo dnf swap akmod-nvidia*340* akmod-nvidia*495* --allowerasing which would replace the 340 driver with the current and latest 495 driver.
The 340 driver does not support wayland. The 495 driver does support wayland for most things, though there are some apps that do not function with it.