Graphics board drivers etc.

[peterg1000]

I'm about to build a dedicated system to be used solely for Flight sim. I would like to take the plunge into Ubuntu but am worried about the availability of drivers for graphics cards - in particular I am starting with a modesr MSI Radeon R7 240 2GD3.

I assume that windows drivers and OpenGL from Win XP/7/10 are not applicable.

Can someone please enlighten me on this subject as my ignorance is profound!!

[V12]

Again, if You can, avoid AMD GPUs, especialy on Linux. OpenSource driver is poor, AMDGPU driver direct from AMD is not very good too. nVidia is much better solution. With AMD GPUs I have only bad experiences.

[CaptB]

Funny, my RX580 works like a charm, under linux, with the foss driver (yes it needs switching the UI theme and multithreading should be uncommented in defaults.xml to fix the garbled splash screen)

[V12]

multithreading, garbled screen, UI switch, hmm, if it is like charm, hmmm, hmmm.

[CaptB]

multithreading, garbled screen, UI switch, hmm, if it is like charm, hmmm, hmmm.

Is the out of the box situation optimal? No. Is it such a big problem, as you are trying to paint it to be? No. Doing it ONCE after installation and forgetting about it is no big deal for anyone who can open a text editor.

You really seem to be the kind of person who always sees the glass always half empty, cheer up man.

[V12]

It is only BFU point of the view. For me, not problem.
Check this forum for graphics problems and You will see, which GPU is troublemaker. And why user should buy potential troblemaking GPU ?

[CaptB]

It is only BFU point of the view. For me, not problem.
Check this forum for graphics problems and You will see, which GPU is troublemaker. And why user should buy potential troblemaking GPU ?

Well, that's interesting, because you see I used to have a nvidia in my system and every time i apt-upgraded the kernel the nvidia blob driver would fail and I would have to go through some gymnastics to make X11 work again, so it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows either. Does that make the GPU bad? No, when it worked it worked fine (except for tearing)

At the end of the day, buying a GPU is a choice, not always a simple one since budget and other factors(like scalping) come into play. Claiming that it is some incredible problem to make AMD GPUs work correctly with flightgear is simply untrue, especially if the GPU is not the newest generation, which like any new hardware on linux can lag in support.

[peterg1000]

Guys - I hear all your comments and am rather alarmed that some degree of black magic has to be deployed to get graphics cards operational.

Does this imply that there are no validated manufacturer drivers for Linux similat to the Win 7/8/10 versions. And how about "OpenGL" - is there an equivalent under Linux?

Just get the feeling that selecting Ubuntu as an OS is opening a large can of worms that the inexperienced, like me, would struggle with.

[danielHL]

The closed-source NVidia driver is pretty stable. Never had any issue with it, it always worked after every update. On the other hand the fglrx-driver (amd/ati) never worked at all, although the free driver is comparatively very powerful for amd. I run amd on my laptop and it works sort of okay for debugging and developing. For flying and having fun: chose NVidia at all cost!