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.
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
Proprietary Drivers
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Mint, and derivatives
Most of the time, the easiest way is using the "Additional Drivers" dialogue. That does not always work though, and it sometimes will offer less-than-ideal versions of drivers for your NVIDIA card. If your card is supported by the current NVIDIA driver, the following command should pull in the required libraries:
You can also install other series of drivers (313.x, 319.x, 331.x, etc.) by appending the version name to them:
Examples:
For the 32-bit libraries, as long as libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 and multiarch-support are installed, it should install them automatically. If, after you install them from the Ubuntu repositories, it does not show up, try to install those packages mentioned previously:
sudo apt-get install multiarch-support
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx:i386
The manual installation is a bit more involved, but it is preferred by a lot of users.
Will add more later
Debian
Debian, because of the nature of the project, does not include these drivers in their repository by default, so you have to enable the non-free repository to get the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. You can find that information here:
Fedora
Arch
Gentoo
Optimus
NVIDIA Optimus technology is a feature in laptops with newer Intel CPU's with integrated GPUs and discrete NVIDIA graphics cards that allows switching between graphics processors on-the-fly, to optimize the performance when needed, and maximizing battery life when not needing the discrete graphics card. More information on Optimus can be found here:
Most distributions
The current working solution is maintained by the Bumblebee Project. PRIME is not recommended, as it utilizes the open-source NVIDIA driver (nouveau), and will not give the performance desired for most games. The project's website has detailed documentation for most major distributions, so it is recommended to go by that:
Gentoo
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:
AMD
Proprietary Drivers
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Mint, and derivatives
As of now, the official Ubuntu docs are VERY detailed in the installation of the open-source and proprietary graphics drivers. It is recommended to use their documentation for your AMD card on the Ubuntu distros (Mint should be very similar, if not exactly the same). You can find that information here:
Debian
Debian, because of the nature of the project, does not include these drivers in their repository by default, so you have to enable the non-free repository to get the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers. You can find that information here:
Fedora
Arch
Gentoo
Open-Source Drivers
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Mint, and derivatives
We refer you to the same link:
Debian
The installation of the open source radeon driver is straightforward, and is likely installed on your system by default. More information on the Debian radeon driver can be found here:
Fedora
The open-source radeon driver should already be included in your system by default. If you are on a 64-bit version of Fedora, you would only need to install the 32-bit libraries for your graphics card from the Fedora repo and it should work fine with PlayOnLinux.
Arch
Gentoo
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:
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:
Debian
The drivers should already be installed, but if it is not working with OpenGL or you get complaints about the 32-bit graphics libraries being missing, you can should try to run:
Command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
If that does not work, you can also install the package manually:
If you are still having problems, consult the Debian docs here:
Fedora
The open-source Intel driver should already be included in your system by default. If you are on a 64-bit version of Fedora, you would only need to install the 32-bit libraries for your graphics card from the Fedora repo and it should work fine with PlayOnLinux.
