TR Forums

So I just bought a new system based off of the Tech Reports Guide. I am using this for encoding and it is CPU intensive and not video intensive so I thought I would go with the on board video on the Gigabyte Z370 Motherboard. When I boot into Mint it does not see the video properly. I get a error : Running in Software Rendering mode
inxi -Gx produces:

Graphics: Card: Intel Device 3e92 bus-ID: 00:02.0
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: fbdev,intel (unloaded: vesa)
Resolution: [email protected]
GLX Renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 5.0, 256 bits)
GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.2.4 Direct Rendering: Yes
so the I figured I would pickup a video card and throw in there, so Nvida or AMD?
I was looking at a GIGABYTE GeForce GT 1030 Slience Low Profile 2GB, GV-N1030SL-2GL for nvida,

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6814125973

but no idea of what would be comparable for AMD
Thanks
Rob

The onboard should work fine. Intel hasn't changed anything in awhile. I wouldn't spend any more money on a video card that won't be used for gaming.
I'll let those more intelligent on the Mint front help you diagnose, just want to caution on throwing more money at it.

Upgrading to a newer version of the Intel GPU driver (or a more recent version of Mint, depending on what version you're running) would probably fix that without requiring new hardware.

That GeForce card should be fine, but you'll want to install the latest Linux drivers from Nvidia instead of relying on the drivers bundled with your distro. Same thing goes for any recent AMD card. Unless you're using a card that's at least a couple of years old, in general you'll want/need Nvidia's or AMD's binary drivers.

In general, I'm in agreement with Usacomp - you shouldn't need to throw more money at this to fix it. Pursue the Intel driver update angle first.

Does this link help?

The RX 550 would be the equivalent AMD card (i.e. cheapest model that has the latest encode/decode hardware), although it is a little more powerful. I can't help with the Linux side of things though.

You may need to add padoka or edgers ppa to upgrade your Mesa drivers to something that is not added to the main repository yet. Then Intel onboard should work fine. Regardless having a 1030 won't hurt. Heck you may even game with it. Light gaming of course but it will be stable.

Coffee lake graphics support won't land until Kernel 4.15.

So until you get that kernel, you'll need to set an Alpha flag off when you boot, and that's beyond my skillset.

Check out Phoronix. They've been covering this since Coffee lake's launch.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... L-No-Alpha

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... hics&num=1

Kernels can be downloaded from the official ubuntu repository and I can say 4.15rcs are pretty stable after rc8. I have been using it for a while without any issues. Installing kernel under ubuntu based distro is as simple as sudo dpkg -i ....

grub switches are also simple. just edit /etc/default/grub with sudo privilages and add the necessary flatgs after quite splash line within " ". Then update grub and you are all set.

Mint has some sort of kernel management system in it's update manager. I know that I'm on 4.13 something at the moment. 4.15 should go mainline sometime next week.

I agree with others saying just sort out the Intel drivers and don't bother with another card.

I do want to clarify something that JBI wrote though:

just brew it! wrote:

but you'll want to install the latest Linux drivers from Nvidia instead of relying on the drivers bundled with your distro. Same thing goes for any recent AMD card. Unless you're using a card that's at least a couple of years old, in general you'll want/need Nvidia's or AMD's binary drivers.

Ubuntu is actually quite good at keeping up with the nVidia binary drivers as long as you aren't looking for bleeding edge binary drivers, but you have to know which package to install.

First of all go to https://www.geforce.com/drivers and fill in the details in "Manual Driver Search". This will give you a bunch of results for the drivers and some of them are already in the Ubuntu repository - e.g. nvidia-384 is recommended for quite a lot of cards and "sudo apt install nvidia-384" is a lot easier than trying to do the binary install.

Ubuntu now has a repo for the bleeding edge nvidia binary drivers. There is no need to download from nvidia directly. Just add the repo to your list of sources and install by sudo apt-get install nvidia-<majorversion>

It automatically selects the proper minor version for the installed hardware.

If you had wanted to game on Linux, Nvidia would be the current immediate choice to just get stuff working well.

AMD is making progress but hasn't quite caught up.

If you're not wanting to game- figure out how to get the Intel stuff working. There's no reason that it shouldn't!

Thanks for all the info guys, after digging into some of the links posted here and finding out that Coffee Lake wont be officially supported until kernel 4.15, I did find the work around to get the alpha drivers to load. I added :"i915.alpha_support=1" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" in Grub.

Works great now Thanks again

Rob

Cool. Glad you got it working!