Mastodawn

How can I find out what graphics card upgrade is compatible with my system?

I have a PC that I got from someone else who built their PC and it is finally starting to show its age. Sometimes when I open applications, the frame rate drops.

I think it is using one of these currently, from 2014. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/900-series/

I know that gfx cards have to be compatible with your Power Supply, and your PCI-E slot, but not sure what else I should know??

I would like to get something very compatible with Linux, Firefox, and Wayland, with lots of hardware codecs. Intel ARC?

How do you learn all this stuff?

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 Series Powered by Maxwell Architecture

The 900 series has been replaced by the all new 30 Series line of graphics cards powered by NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture.

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olosta

I’m a bit surprised an Nvidia 9x0 would struggle for web browsing. On a PC this old I would first check other things before swapping the GPU:

Is it clean? Physically clean? Restricted air flow can make your CPU throttle down to avoid getting too hot.
Is the operating system on an SSD or a spinning disk? I’m sure prices are insane nowadays but a small data SSD just for the OS will dramatically improve performance.
How much RAM do you have? Again, prices are not good right now, but 8GiB is the minimum to run a modern desktop+browser.
Do you have the proprietary drivers installed? I haven’t touched an Nvidia GPU on Linux in a long time, but I would expect those to be basically mandatory for a smooth experience.

As for the GPU, if you are not gaming on big modern titles, anything released in the last ten years should be enough. I had a good experience with AMD over this era for out of the box Linux compatibility, but I can’t say much about codecs, I never had issues and never bothered to check.

Intel is probably good enough also.

Another thing to consider is maybe your CPU has a built-in GPU, I use low/mid-range Intel CPU from this era without a discrete GPU as an HTPC and it performs fine.

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sem Feb 5

It doesn’t struggle with web browsing per se., just with opening and closing windows mostly. I just experienced it – I open the file browser, the system hangs for a moment or two where I can’t move the mouse. Then the mouse jerks around for a bit. Then the system is smooth again. I looked in System Monitor right after this happened and didn’t see any big spikes in storage, CPU, or memory, so I am assuming GPU.

It is probably not physically clean. I should address that first.

It is running on a Samsung SSD 830 series. I tried enabling write cache. I ran into the system stuttering problem (described above) clicking ‘cancel’ on a random dialog.

I have had a lot of problems with codecs, and video playback being choppy everywhere, which is why I am focused on getting good hardware codecs that are supported under linux.

The CPU/motherboard definitely does have a built-in iGPU. I think I could try it out with prime-select. Maybe that is worth experimenting.