I'm building a triple-boot gaming system with Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 11, and Linux, all connected to a CRT monitor. The hardware is an overclocked i5-4690K, 16 GB of fast DDR3, an MSI GTX 980 Ti Golden Gamer, and an X-Fi Titanium sound card. The 980 Ti is important because it has XP driver support, a DVI-I port for the CRT, and considerably more performance than the Radeon HD 7970/R9 280X. The machine is used only for gaming, with no multiplayer gaming or other security-sensitive workloads. How well are the GTX 980 Ti and X-Fi Titanium supported on Linux? Would the answer depend heavily on the distribution, and are there any driver limitations I should expect?
3 Answers
You have two practical graphics options: the proprietary legacy NVIDIA driver for the best performance, or the reverse-engineered nouveau driver for easier installation on some distributions. Nouveau may be convenient, particularly on certain rolling-release systems, but the official driver is the better choice if you want maximum performance and reliable support for modern games.
The 980 Ti should work well, but you’ll need the appropriate legacy NVIDIA driver branch. The 580-series driver is the final official branch for this card. Use the regular proprietary driver rather than the 580-open package, since the open kernel module doesn’t support this older Maxwell GPU. Nouveau can work, but performance is generally worse. The main issue is that some distributions may not package the driver, so an Arch-based system or a distribution with suitable legacy-driver support may be easier.
The 580 branch is still supported for now, so you don’t necessarily need an LTS kernel immediately. Once NVIDIA ends support for that branch, an LTS kernel or community-maintained patches may become necessary.
The X-Fi Titanium has kernel support through the snd_ctxfi driver, so basic audio output should work. Some of the card’s advanced features may require manual configuration or may not be available under Linux. If you don’t need features such as EAX, it should be perfectly usable for ordinary gaming audio.
That’s fine for me. I can boot into XP whenever I want the older EAX features.
When you say an older driver, do you mean it still works normally but just misses some newer optimizations?