
Accelerate Your Gaming #100
Chapter 11, Hardware
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HACK
HACK
#100
Accelerate Your Gaming Hack #100
Squeeze as much juice as possible out of your 3D graphics card with a
commercial driver.
As Linux use grows, more device manufacturers are creating official Linux
drivers; this is particularly true of video card manufacturers. The benefit of
having official drivers is that the manufacturer, which has complete access
to all the hardware specifications, is able to write a definitive driver that
makes the device as usable in Linux as it is in other operating systems. The
flip side to this benefit, however, is that some commercial drivers for graph-
ics cards are written as closed source software, and sometimes they incorpo-
rate incomplete or unstable features. Some drivers have been particularly
reliable, such as those from NVIDIA, but you should browse the Internet to
see how reliable other official drivers are. Sometimes a driver’s stability
changes between versions, but not always for the better. So, your Internet
searches might reveal that the best driver is not the most recent one.
This hack shows you how to install the binary drivers provided by the man-
ufacturer for recent-model video cards from ATI and NVIDIA.
Preparing for the Installation
Many official drivers require that specific versions of software be used to
build and run the driver. This required software usually includes the kernel,
the ...