Help sought for GT240 in Linux.

I have been using a Gainward GT240 with 1Gb of GDDR5 for video editing and Full HD in Windows XP which works fine but have decided to switch to Linux Mint because it is a dream to use (Less problems). However my main interest is video and the card just will not work properly no matter what driver is installed. In 1080p the System Monitor shows the CPU cores topping out at 100% or just below indicating the cause of the constant strutter on video playback.

The card was purchased with the aim of being a low powered solution to taking the strain off of the CPU which it does in Windows but unfortunately not with Linux. I have been driven back to Windows because of this on several occasions but enough is enough. I am not computer savvy just a Widows clicker so the solution needs to be simple.

Not used Mint, but generally you need to install the proprietary drivers from Nvida to get any kind of video accel and then you need a program that knows how to use it.

Try looking for a guide on installing MythTV for your distro, that needs to deal with this sort of stuff so should be a good source of hints.

Thanks for the tip I will look into it. I started off with Ubuntu but my daughter liked the green of mint but I will consider moving to any distro that is particularly good with video if any. Perhaps they all perform the same. The motherboard is an M2N-E-SLI with an Amd 64x2 3800 processor. The system ram is 1Gb but only half of it is used at 1080p. It is amazing how much hard work a computer makes of video when a WD TV HD media player can play 1080p smoothly on 14 wats but nothing is perfect in every area so the pc has to be used.

The system had Nvidia 195-36-15 but tried to get the 24 upgrade but couldn't obtain a usable file.

After installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers (which you have), you now need to install a media player which supports VDPAU (this is the Nvidia API which allows hardware accelerated video decoding). I have heard that Gnome Mplayer and SMPlayer are easy to set up as they have a VDPAU option inside the app which you can enable. Other supported apps are XBMC and VLC.

Sadly I do not have a VDPAU capable Nvidia gpu myself to test this, but hopefully I have pointed you in the right direction.