Arch Linux

The Orange Peanut

Member

Registered: 2008-01-06

Posts: 152

Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

Currently, I have a Radeon 9500 Pro video card, and no matter which driver I use (catalyst or open source), it freezes my computer dead.  In Ubuntu this really only happened when I did something with OpenGL (even glxgears) but since I've switched to Arch it has happened even while loading KDE.  Right now, I don't even have a xorg.conf file because that's the only way I can get my computer to load a GUI (I'm guessing that it is defaulting to using vesa drivers?)

The point is that my friend is bringing me an Nvidia 5200 video card and I'm going to use that, but I'm wondering how the performance is.  I'm pretty sure it's gonna render things faster than my vesa'd 9500 Pro, but I know that my video card is actually much faster if I could ever have gotten it to work properly.  Does the 5200 support compositing, for example, without being slow?  Is having a slow video card going to hurt me in someway (I do OpenGL programming, but only small things).  Also, my current card is hooked up to my LCD via DVI, but the 5200 only has VGA outputs; how much of a degrade in quality will I see on my LCD?

Thanks for the help.

bgc1954

Member

From: Edmonton, AB, Canada

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 1,160

Re: Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

Alot of people on the forums seem to be having trouble with ATI cards recently so I'm glad I bought an nvidia card to replace an old ATI Rage card awhile ago.  Apparently nvidia and linux are a tad more friendly with each other.  I certainly had no problems setting up my card.  The 5200 is a little older than my 6200 and I'm not sure what effect the vga out is going to have but I'm sure you'll be happy with the nvidia card.

After a recent nvidia driver upgrade I had to switch back to the nvidia-96xx driver for games to work properly so I'd say that you most likely will not be able to run the latest nvidia driver.

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

The Orange Peanut

Member

Registered: 2008-01-06

Posts: 152

Re: Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

Thanks for the info.  I'm not worried about games or anything, I just want a video card that will give me smooth videos and not crash my system for no reason   Hopefully this card does the trick.

sash

Member

Registered: 2005-10-16

Posts: 155

Re: Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

I have a 5200 at the moment and I have no complaints. It does stuff like compiz fairly well. Then, I am not the person to obsess over frame rates either...

brain0

Developer

From: Aachen - Germany

Registered: 2005-01-03

Posts: 1,382

Re: Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

The Nvidia 5200 is probably the worst card Nvidia ever produced, performance-wise.

venox

Member

From: Curitiba, Brazil

Registered: 2003-08-23

Posts: 137

Website

Re: Nvidia 5200, how is the performance?

If you just want to watch videos smoothly and you're not a gamer (aka benchmark-maniac user), the 5200 will perfectly fit your needs.

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