Mint 18.1 and Video Drivers

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
I just purchased a brand new Samsung 850 EVO SSD drive and install Mint 18.1 64-bit on it.
Of course one of the first things I do is update Cinnamon and install Nvidia 378 drivers.

Reboot

For some strange reason I am still getting this "Running in software rendering mode" pop-up. Normally that happens when the video card/chip isn't supported, so Linux will use the CPU instead. I'm guessing that something isn't working so I uninstall the drivers and go with nouveau drivers.
No go... still get the same pop-up

mode.png


So now I figure, maybe its the kernel and Mint update has a kernel update available. So I install the new kernel: 4.4.0-66-generic

Reboot

Still no luck. I normally install Nvidia drivers from the xedgers ppa and since it didn't work, I just tried the reliable Mint Nvidia drivers, but still nothing

nvidia.png


As you can see, I have "2 proprietary drivers in use" but Cinnamon really doesn't believe that because I'm stuck in "software rendering mode"

After some research I found that adding "nomodeset" in the Grub boot options might fix this, but it didn't work.
When I run: glxinfo | grep render
Code:
direct rendering: Yes
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.8, 128 bits)
    GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, GL_ARB_conservative_depth,
    GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp, GL_NV_packed_depth_stencil,
    GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, GL_ARB_conservative_depth,
    GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
    GL_OES_element_index_uint, GL_OES_fbo_render_mipmap,
This actually makes sense because I have an AMD CPU and its processing all of the graphics right now, but its supposed to output Nvidia info...

I'm not sure what else to try at this point
 
I have no experience with integrated graphics, but I have heard that some let you completely disable the integrated graphics in the BIOS setup, so you could have a look if some option like that is available.
 
I'm pretty sure my Athlon II doe not have integrated GPU
Its using the CPU for processing graphics.
Strange that I've never experienced this before and I have 6 computer with Mint 18 installed, GeForce GPU's and no problems.

Maybe its related to the BIOS and the SSD drive?
 
Here is my CPU: Athlon II 455
Definitely no integrated graphics. Even my motherboard doesn't have integrated graphics. Its all GeForce GTX 960 in there
 
Fixed!
I still have my old SSD with Mint 17.3 on it and decided to go back and play a game.
Shutdown and about 3 hours later, booted up and now the drivers are fine...
I have no idea what happened?
But no more pop-up and games are working perfectly.
 
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