I just upgraded the video card on my home PC; the integrated video is a GForce2 chipset, decent for older games. The new one bears the Nvidia logo, and the model number P118, which as near as I can tell is a 5200MX of some sort. It was free, and is better than the integrated video, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.
At first there was no appreciable difference, so I decided to upgrade the nvidia drivers. There was a problem the last time I tried to do this; that problem being that the newest nvidia drivers did not work with the GForce2, only newer cards. So, I had continued to use old drivers, which worked quite well. This seemed like a good time to upgrade; the newest stable nvidia version (I’ll have to find the number later) was my first stop.
These bombed out in a big way. I tried a newer (2.6.11) kernel, rebooting, re-compiling the drivers; no success.
Then I tried the newest of the new nvidia drivers, the version still masked as “testing” in the portage tree. After a reboot, these worked fine, and my framerates from glxgears are about triple what they were before, from 200-300fps to about 600-800fps. Very nice.
So yo upgraded Nvidia p118 with test drivers and it worked better? Where do you get those drivers? I have an Nvidia p118 card without ds-59 cable adapter and need drivers to install in a Dell computer. Any sugestions where I can get those.
There are a few ways to get the drivers; at the time I wrote this I was using Gentoo Linux, and the drivers were in testing in portage (Gentoo’s software packaging system). I’m currently using Ubuntu Linux, and the drivers are also in the package management system; I just had to search for nvidia, and also needed to load a restricted-modules package for my architecture (restricted just in the sense that they are non-GPL).
Otherwise, you can always get the drivers from Nvidia’s site; they offer a Linux version. It is actually not too difficult to install their version, and IIRC they provide a README that is fairly informative. Using this method (most methods, actually) you would also need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver, once it is installed.
This can be a bit of a learning process the first few times you have to do it, but it can be done; nvidia cards a quite common, so if you keep searching you should find the solution you need. Have fun. :)