Good Graphics Card For 4k display on Linux Mint

[ShadowTux]

Hello!

I'm looking to upgrade my Geforce 750 Ti and a buy a 4k display. How well does Linux Mint or Ubuntu hande 4k content and what GPU do you suggest me to buy? I'm not a gamer so I don't need a power house GPU but something that can hande 4k60fps video.

[NTDaws]

AMD has the best support on Linux, so I would say. RX 580

[Beddah]

RX580/RX480.

[code_glitch]

Do you care about driver open-ness in the slightest? If not probably an nvidia card. If you want an open driver for 2D stuff, just use the intel integrated stuff they have these days. If you like having open drivers and all the benefits that brings, get a GCN 1.0 or 1.1 based ATI/AMD card.

 

From what I've seen all three can have the odd hiccup, and theres an argument to be made that nvidia hurts the community some with their driver/blob policy. For gaming though they are probably going to offer the best end user experience. AMD cards just dont have the same performance as comparable nvidia cards because of drivers but will run circles around the intel graphics. Intel graphics are solid, but pretty slow for most modern games.

[pipnina]

Mint (with cinnamon) has a 2x scaling option (which should mean perfect scaling between 1080 and 4k).

Mint with MATE might be a different story (you'd need to set DPI for text and resize UI elements, and even then it might not be perfect.)

 

GPU wise, not counting gaming. I imaging a lower end GPU than 480 would be more than sufficient for 4k60 playback. But AMD does have better support with open source drivers.

[ShadowTux]

1 minute ago, code_glitch said:

Do you care about driver open-ness in the slightest? If not probably an nvidia card. If you want an open driver for 2D stuff, just use the intel integrated stuff they have these days. If you like having open drivers and all the benefits that brings, get a GCN 1.0 or 1.1 based ATI/AMD card.

 

From what I've seen all three can have the odd hiccup, and theres an argument to be made that nvidia hurts the community some with their driver/blob policy. For gaming though they are probably going to offer the best end user experience. AMD cards just dont have the same performance as comparable nvidia cards because of drivers but will run circles around the intel graphics. Intel graphics are solid, but pretty slow for most modern games.

I care about the open-ness for a little bit but I care more that it works on the platform.

[ShadowTux]

2 minutes ago, pipnina said:

Mint (with cinnamon) has a 2x scaling option (which should mean perfect scaling between 1080 and 4k).

Mint with MATE might be a different story (you'd need to set DPI for text and resize UI elements, and even then it might not be perfect.)

 

GPU wise, not counting gaming. I imaging a lower end GPU than 480 would be more than sufficient for 4k60 playback. But AMD does have better support with open source drivers.

I use the Cinnamon desktop. I didn't know that the Cinnamon does have that scaling option. Now I do 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, ShadowTux said:

I care about the open-ness for a little bit but I care more that it works on the platform.

IGPU's and AMD cards are your answer then. Nvidia gives a lot of people pain with Cinnamon and MATE. I use a IGPU fine with Cinnamon.

[code_glitch]

Just now, ShadowTux said:

I care about the open-ness for a little bit but I care more that it works on the platform.

In which case the AMD recommendations arent far off the mark. Performance is good, just not excellent like the nvidia driver, the amdgpu/radeonsi drivers have modern GL nowadays and are open. Running them daily here they are very solid and reliability is good with one minor caveat: Audio over HDMI can be hit and miss because DC/DAL is still waiting to be mainlined in the kernel so if thats important you'll want to use the optional hybrid AMDGPU-PRO stack. An intel card is fully open but you'll pay the price in performance. I'm pretty sure they'd handle 4k/60f video but I dont know how much of that would be dependent on a good CPU.

FWIW: As far as I have seen, the HMDI audio thing is only relevant on GCN1.2 and later. A GCN1.0/1.1 card like my old 7770 is 100% solid out of the box. Likewise for my even older 5xxx series card.