# nouveau or nvidia drivers?

## leonchik1976

hi! i have ASUS P8Z68 DELUXE MB, CPU i7-2600, and nVidia ASUS ENGTX550 Ti Graphics Card.

lspci shows me 2 cards - intel & nvidia.

so which drivers/modules should i use?

intel+nouveau+nvidia? all 3 of them?

what the difference between nvidia and nouveau drivers? which of those two better to use?

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## _SerEga_

I think you need nvidia only. 

all intel card have low performance. 

Two cards at same moment needed only for laptops(for switching performance/powersave)

nouveau - open source drivers, if 

nvidia - proprietary driver, prefer for newer cards and games

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## Deathwing00

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Kernel & Hardware.

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## DirtyHairy

Nonsense, I have a core i7 IGP in my laptop which does a damn good job for everyday use --- low power use, rock stable, ultra smooth KDE compositing, video and even the few 3D games I tried. What to use for your laptop depends on how stuff is wired and what you are looking for --- the discrete nvidia chip will be definitely faster but likely more power hungry, and you'll need the nvidia blob for decent support. I guess three scenarios are possible:

- IGP is permanently disabled (not wired to the video out), you'll have to use the nvidia chip.

- Both chips can be wired to the video out. You'll have to stick with what you can (hopefully) select in the BIOS; afaik, on the fly switching is defunct in linux at the moment, especially with this combination.

- "Nvidia optimus": the nvidia chip cannot be wired to the video out, but instead renders to the intel IGPs framebuffer. You'll have to use the intel driver, and if you're lucky, you can drive the nvidia chip using a wrapper called bumblebee  :Wink: 

[EDIT] Oh, sorry, I just saw that you are likely talking about a desktop. In this case, I presume, you'll want to use your nvidia card. You can try using the opensource nouveau driver, but chances are that the nvidia blob will give you significantly better performance and powersaving, for the price of being closed source. As the nvidia card has its own video out, wiring the things is obviously no issue here  :Smile: 

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## chithanh

Nouveau in kernel up to 3.0 will require external firmware for acceleration on your GTX 550 Ti. The firmware has to be extracted from the blob at runtime. This is no longer be necessary in the nouveau code that will be part of kernel 3.1 (available through nouveau-drm ebuild).

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