Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Camaleón wrote:
On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:54:53 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
On 2009-12-14 13:28 +0100, Camaleón wrote:
Be sure to avoid Nvidia graphics cards then.
Why?
There is "nv" driver (2D) and soon it will be "nouveau" (2D+3D) driver
available. Both are open source.
The nv driver is heavily obfuscated¹ and, perhaps more importantly, it
lacks some very basic features.
[snip]
It seems we have not many real choices, then :-(
[...]
FWIW, I gave up on using the ati drivers for my card, because I could
not be bothered with all the bugs and with having to reinstall and
configure it on every new kernel version.
So ATI are another brand, I'd recommend to avoid. From what I read, the
overall hassle is generally far less on using Intel cards. YMMV, of
course and not all models of any manufacturer behave the same...
I also gave up on ATI's proprietary 'fglrx' driver several years ago,
exactly because it doesn't work as advertised: it seemed to be more
like a practical joke on users than a functional device driver.
So, when I built a new desktop machine in 2007 I bought an NVidia card:
a GeForce 7950 GT. I was happy with its performance, and was annoyed
with jumping through the hoops to keep the proprietary 'nvidia' driver
up to date... but at least those drivers work. (Usually.)
But then it turned out that NVidia had released two generations of
defective parts -- GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 -- and got their rear ends
sued off. My own GeForce 7950 GT died on me this past summer, just a
few months ago... barely a 2-year old card.
In the meantime, I had been following the new developments with the open
source ATI drivers. I noticed that within 6 months of the initial
release of documentation by AMD/ATI, users of those cards were reporting
that video was working better with the open source drivers than with
'fglrx'. I decided then that my next card would have to be ATI... and
when the 7950 GT died, I was even more motivated to switch to ATI.
I've had a Radeon HD 4850 for a couple of months now. Basic 2D support
is just fine. Acceleration (both 2D and 3D) on my generation of cards
has just appearing recently -- and I have been fighting/playing with
cutting edge source code, including upstream kernels, upstream Mesa and
libdrm libraries, and upstream X drivers (radeonhd, radeon) -- with very
positive results.
Progress on 3 fronts -- DRM in the kernel, 3D support in Mesa, and
advances in the 'radeon' driver ('radeonhd' is now lagging behind, and
is probably doomed) -- is very rapid. At the beginning of November,
OpenGL support was corrupt and useless on my card. By mid-November,
fixes in 'radeon' and Mesa gave me nice accelerated 2D/3D for simple
desktop activity, video, and non-demanding OpenGL games. At the moment,
I am trying to triage a Mesa bug which is causing the more demanding
OpenGL games to suddenly die and disappear (though not crashing X), and
I believe that before the end of 2009 I will have a completely
functional 2D/3D support for this card.
So, after years of preferring NVidia over ATI, I am actually
recommending for folks to switch to ATI (or Intel, if they don't care
about good 3D acceleration) because of their demonstration of support
for open source drivers and, now, because those drivers are actually
working quite well. All of the hassles with building upstream source
code I have been dealing with lately will be gone by Q1 2010, and merely
using stable packages from ordinary repositories will give me ATI
support that Just Works!
IMHO, very good time to be using, or switching to, ATI!
Just my 2 cents,
Dave W.
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