Our technologically driven society has came a long way in a short period of time, it’s no wonder Nvidia has literally became a household name. Something that many people may not know, is that the famous video card developer has a long history of supporting Linux and Unix operating systems.
Nvidia maintains updated and full featured drivers for the Linux kernel. These drivers are often ported to other *nix operating systems as well. FreeBSD, a popular server operating system, is one of many known to have ported Nvidia linux drivers.
This devotion to the open source community combined with Nvidia’s environmental conservation efforts make Nvidia a great asset to the *nix community and a credit for environmental friendly business practices.
This however, is just icing on the cake. Nvidia’s popular graphics cards are powerful contenders in the video card market. They perform very well with today’s top new games. Many technologies developed by Nvidia have become standards in which game manufacturers use in many titles for specific Nvidia features.
One of the fundamental elements of Nvidia GPUs is their CUDA core technology. This hyper-threaded method of graphics processing takes gaming to a whole new level, but it also has a more sinister use. These cores can be used to process advanced algorithms used to crack many different types of encryption. While I don’t condone using the hardware for these purposes, I do think it is important that everyone know the power of Nvidia’s graphics cards.
The driver support for Linux operating systems combined with wine make most native Windows games play very well. This means both Windows and Linux gamers can utilize the power of Nvidia’s visual technologies.
Nvidia and Linux Test Box
CPU: Quadcore AMD X4 2.91ghz
RAM: 4gb DDR3
Nvidia Card:Geforce 430 GT 1gb DDR
Under many different Linux distributions and wine, you can run games like ID and Bethesda’s RAGE flawlessly. Dragon Age 2 is another title that runs like a champ. Named by some as “The Scariest Game Ever Made, Dead Space 2, is yet another resource intensive game that runs perfect under Linux and wine with an Nvidia video card. It outperforms when running the same titles I have played on consoles as well. Even under a Windows compatibility layer like wine, Nvidia’s performance under Linux operating systems is quite impressive.
This is one of the reasons more and more Android devices with Nvidia processors have been being made available on the market. Linux based platforms like Android reap the same benefits of Nvidia’s Linux driver support. For users of Linux and any other operating system, Nvidia cards are a great choice for performance and quality, as well as supporting green businesses.
About Allen Morey
