On 7/1/05, Justin Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> To counter this argument, I would point out that I don't normally
> purchase used 3D acceleration hardware, and that by the time these
> cards are "old" they will also be "obsolete," meaning that you will
> have sunk a good amount of money into hardware that didn't work
> properly for you until it was outdated.
>
> nVidia's drivers, on the other hand, have worked with brand new
> hardware since I owned a Riva TNT (1998). They continue to work.
> Anybody with a new ATI card, however, has to choose a manner in which
> they are going to cripple X.Org. Do you want composite or DRI?
> Before, the choice wasn't even an option. Also, fglrxconfig output
> bad xorg.conf files last I checked, because I had to hand-tune mine to
> get the server working.
Obviously we´d all like to have our systems up and running as easily
as possible, but I don´t think that "having to hand-tune" anything
should be counted as a problem by any of us here... we use Gentoo
after all, don´t we? ;-)
>
> Justin
>
> On 7/1/05, Jens Mayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > * 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
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Justin W. Hart
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
--
Rafael Dantas de Castro
Engenharia de Computação 2001 - Unicamp
- Laboratório de Criptografia Aplicada
"Se procurar bem você acaba encontrando.
Não a explicação (duvidosa) da vida,
Mas a poesia (inexplicável) da vida."
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