nvidia drivers non 3d performance

[frag79]

I have a diamond Viper 550 video card, and since I don't play any games, I've always used the generic nvidia driver from xfree86. Is there any advantage to switching to the official nvidia kernel module?

[CoffeeMan]

The official driver would be more efficient, and video playback would be better.

[cybertron]

I switched distros recently and waited a while before trying to install the NVidia 3d drivers, so there were a couple of things that I noticed when I finally did. First, one of the pages on my web site is rather long (it's basically a log file), and pre-nvidia drivers it was noticeably slow when I would scroll down it. Afterwards it worked like I though it should. That may be true for other sites, although I noticed most on mine because I thought maybe something was wrong with it.

Another minor thing was that switching to a virtual console from X was much quicker. There was quite a delay before I installed the drivers, to the point where it was rather annoying. That went away after installation.

Those are just my experiences with it so YMMV.

[Gogeta_44]

Of course the nvidia proprietary drivers don't follow the GNU GPL and taint the kernel, but other than that go right ahead. :D

No real damage from that, but if you have no reason what so ever to upgrade, that would be a reason not too.