Re: Please recommend zero-hassle video card for GUIX

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello Yasuaki,

Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> As per the subject-line, what is the very best video chip/card for GUIX?  My 
> criteria:
>
> • I use AMD Ryzen 5 CPU (The chip has no integrated video feature enabled)
> • I currently use NVIDIA with proprietary driver support provided by
> corresponding NixOS packages but now I am considering switching from
> NixOS to Guix – so I prefer to have a video card that runs natively
> without proprietary driver enabling gimmick.
> • The video card should behave normally – there should be no performance 
> degradation in 2D/3D/video, etc.

Behaving normally is an easy target, but "no performance degradation in
2D/3D/video less so, because I'm not sure a GPU exists that can do video
decoding without a binary blob.

I'm currently using an old nVIDIA 8800 GTS on my desktop with the
nouveau driver.  2D and 3D seems fine and stable (I don't play games
though), but it doesn't accelerate videos, so some applications will use
a lot of CPU.

At work, I use another nVIDIA card (GeForce GTX 680) with similar
results (good desktop performance, no video acceleration).

I don't know what the landscape looks like on the AMD side, but I know
their recent cards boasting the free AMDGPU driver are nearly useless
without the binary blobs (no 3D support, and that's if you're lucky that
it doesn't leave you on a black screen at boot).

You can view reports of video hardware at h-node.org [0].

Hope that helps!

Maxim

[0]  https://h-node.org/videocards/catalogue/en