<quote who="Michael Jinks"> > Hi all. > > We're in the process of drafting a proposal for upgrading the Debian > machines in our public computing lab, as well as replacing our last > remaining SGI machine with a Debian box. The SGI in particular is mostly > used for scientific visualization applications. > > I know this question gets asked on a regular basis, but given a need for > quick and clear 3D imaging (OpenGL, usually), is there currently a clear > preference for which video card to use?
my opinion: if you want raw performance, with somewhat mature drivers and not have to worry about having to run the bleeding edge - nvidia is the king. there is the issue of them using a closed source kernel module though. Depends on how you feel about using them. I avoided nvidia for a long time as the driver matured, but for me it is almost rock solid on my 2.2.19 kernel. I think i have only had 2 problems, one where if I kept swapping back and forth between console and X the console would lockup eventually(Since i do this so rarely it's not an issue), the other was I had some kind of crash, and all of a sudden X could not detect my video card anymore. its like it was gone. if you want to work with a company that is slightly more open with the community try ATI, their performance is very good but I believe they too use a closed source kernel module. I haven't tried ATI since Mach64 ..... 3DFx Voodoo3 series are nice cards with fully opensource drivers, much slower then ATI or Nvidia though. I read recently that nvidia revoked a lot of the opensource code given to the XFree team so the status of the drivers may of dramatically changed since I was a serious 3DFx user(about a year ago). When I did use them on a day to day basis it was VERY solid. I played unreal tournament(openGL) almost every day for weeks on end without a single problem. Then there are the real slow Matrox G400 series, which at least for 2D is the most stable card I've ever used. I plan to buy more from them soon. There are faster cards..but I think they only have good drivers through AcceleratedX(www.xinside.com), last i checked, the AcceleratedX 3D drivers were not debian-compadible, and I don't think they had plans at the time to fix them sadly. I use AcceleratedX on Solaris/x86 and some freebsd systems. If i were making the decision, and cost was an issue I would probably go for Nvidia cards(probably Geforce3, geforce4 is a little too new for my taste, i use a Geforce2 MX at home) nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
