Graphics Card Drivers

In this section, we will try to cover the basics of getting the most out of your AMD, Nvidia, or Intel graphics card on your Linux system, specifically when using Wine/PlayOnLinux. This can get pretty lengthy, so expect this article to get exponentially bigger as time goes on.

NOTE: This list is going to take a while to get full, so please be patient as we populate everything.

For ease of use, we will break these down into different sections for the graphics card manufacturer, and then distro's within those categories.

NVIDIA

Open-Source Drivers

Unfortunately, the open-source nouveau drivers are not really up-to-par on performance yet for gaming. Things are starting to look up, but there are a lot of caveats to running the open-source NVIDIA drivers. More information can be found here:

• http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

• http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_topic&q=Nouveau

Intel

The Intel drivers are developed by the open-source community, so they are by far the easiest to install, as they pretty much will always come with your distro by default. More information on the Intel open-source drivers can be found here:

• https://01.org/linuxgraphics/

For the most part, this will cover how to make sure that you have the most up-to-date graphics stack for your Intel chipset. This applies exclusively to pure Intel graphics only. If you have, say, a mixed-graphics card environment, like a laptop that has an Intel iGPU and a discrete NVIDIA card, please refer to the NVIDIA Optimus section

Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Mint, and derivatives

If you are already running a 32-bit version of one of these systems, you should have everything that you need installed correctly by default.

In the case of 64-bit systems, you already have the 64-bit libraries for your graphics hardware. A package called multiarch-support should pull in the 32-bit libraries, as well as a bunch of others.

Command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get install multiarch-support

If that does not work, you can also install the package manually:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx:i386