* On Friday 01 July 2005 01:49, Justin Hart wrote: > Buying an ATI card for a Linux box is not a good decision. Go with > nVidia, at least their drivers work. I've thought of buying an nVidia > card for this notebook for months because, frankly, ATI hasn't been > taking care of the matter, and won't in the forseeable future.
There's two sides to every story. It is true that nVidia's drivers are ahead of ATI's counterpart, especially on desktop computers. They seem to be much more stable and mature, even while adding new features more quickly, i.e. support for Xorg's render and composite extensions. The situation concerning notebook-specific features is a bit like playing roulette. Most people want to use suspend to disk or suspend to RAM on their quite expensive laptops, and it's both drivers who often fail miserably in that case, whether they are from nVidia or ATI. There are known workarounds which might or might not get the stuff working, the chance of failure is high, depending on numerous other things like the driver for your framebuffered console and so on... Guess what? The open source drivers usually work, but do not offer 3D acceleration in many (ATI) or all (nVidia) cases. Which brings us to another important point: Contrary to nVidia's practice, ATI gives the specifications of older cards to the developer community. That's why there is an open source alternative for ATI's cards up to and includig the Radeon 9200 with working 3D acceleration support, and that's simply why there is no real open source alternative for nVidia cards if you want to use 3D applications on your box. Not that important? Well, while the ATI Mobility FireGL T2 in my IBM laptop is not yet supported by open source drivers, it certainly will be in the future. I wonder who's first in offering a 3D accelerated driver really supporting suspend to disk on my laptop: ATI or the guys from r300.sf.net. ;-) Now vice versa: The Geforce2 GTS in my desktop is quite ancient, but was good enough to play around with Xorg's composite and render extensions to get some solid eyecandy. Guess what? nVidia decided to not support those cards anymore, they now just get the most important bugfixes via some (yet to come) "legacy drivers". Now that means a very little chance to have the new and still experimental stuff getting developed in my card's drivers in the future. Open source alternatives? None. See above. "Buying an ATI card for a Linux box is not a good decision." is too general to be answered with "yes" or "no". Regards, Jens -- Reporter: "What would you do if you found a million dollars?" Yogi Berra: "If the guy was poor, I would give it back." -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
