Looks like it might be a little faster on my laptop if I boot into Linux, pretty similar specs to the system you used.

Hammerhead wrote:


I assume that's going to require the binary nvidia grapics driver, though?

I'm afraid I can't answer that at the moment - all my dev machines have ATI cards in them

Hammerhead wrote:


Ha! I wish I would have known that when I bought my last graphics card I assumed that the devs would be using nvidia cards and went that route - assuming that lightworks wasn't going to work well under linux with an AMD card.

Either way, I assume that you're using AMD's catalyst drivers instead of the radeon drivers?

How well are nVidia cards working for you in Linux? I've had some pretty hit or miss results with laptop nVidia chips. We are (hopefully) getting a pile of computers at work with nVidia 2000 cards (lower end Avid spec) that I would like to try Lightworks on Linux in the future.

Greg_E wrote:


They work as well as any other card, I suppose. It really depends on what capabilities you need.

nouveau works really well for 2D and light 3D but it doesn't have the 3D muscle that the nvidia blob drivers have. I have less experience with them, but I believe that the same can be said about Catalyst vs radeon for AMD cards, too. I've had very few problems using dual monitors on 2 different nvidia cards with nouveau drivers over the last couple years and have been really impressed by what the nouveau devs have been able to do by reverse engingeering and (AFAIK) no support or docs from nvidia.

From what I understand, nvidia's proprietary drivers work best on older, more popular distros - stuff like RHEL, RHEL clones (SL, CentOS) and Ubuntu LTS should work well. Personally, I tend to avoid those drivers for 2 reasons:

1. I don't really need the extra 3D horsepower for my usual workflow
2. They tend to be a bit of a PITA because their conf method is slightly different (have to use the nvidia utility instead of the built-in display conf tools) and there's no guarantee that things aren't going to break with a kernel or xorg update. Once it breaks, who knows how long it'll be before your particular bug is fixed.

But like I said, the "older" distros don't change as often and breakage is less of a risk. Almost all of my machines are running some release of Fedora and Fedora tends to change - unless I actually need the extra 3D stuff, the risk of breakage and the time needed to recover my system isn't really worth it to me.