Ubuntu – Nvidia driver installed but sytem running Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe

galliumgraphicsnvidia

I installed 14.04 a month ago and have not been able to get my Nvidia graphics card to work since that time. Currently the system thinks it is using the Nvidia driver.
Output of lshw -c video is as follows :

description: VGA compatible controller
   product: NV36 [GeForce FX 5700]
   vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
   version: a1
   width: 32 bits
   clock: 66MHz
   capabilities: pm agp agp-3.0 vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
   configuration: driver=nvidia latency=32 maxlatency=1 mingnt=5
   resources: irq:16 memory:f8000000-f8ffffff memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f9000000-f901ffff

and the Additional Drivers tab in Software Updates says my NV36 (Geforce FX5700) is using Nvidia legacy driver version 173.14.39.

But the computer graphics is terribly slow, ie CPU is pretty much running at 100% and the System Overview tells me I am using Graphics Driver Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe(LLVM 3.5, 128 bits).

I have read the answers to many similar problems in askubuntu and I have tried all the likely solutions but without success. Can anybody suggest anything to try? I am not a very experienced Linux user so it has to be a fairly detailed answer (sorry about that).

Best Answer

If you look at your NVidia card compared to modern equivalents I would say: disable it in the BIOS if a laptop, remove it from the PC if a desktop and run Xubuntu (or Lubuntu). Your performance is going to be much better in that case.

The only other way is to buy a new one. (Sorry to be the harbinger of bad news)

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