Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Thursday 28 August 2008 23:30:54 James wrote:
Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes:
It's far from fixed here. Admittedly better than 173.*, but the vast
majority of work remains to be done:
What ever happened to all of those folks that said Nvidia is the
superior video vendor?
That used to be true, and nVidia historically did have the better performance
and support. But two things have changed:
The newer GPUs (starting with 8xxx and 9xxx series) do not have 2D
acceleration in hardware anymore, it's all done in the driver. Some Linux apps
and especially KDE4 use X technologies in ways that nVidia's driver is not
especially good at. Remember that the Linux driver is essentially a port of
the logic in the Windows driver together with the guts of OpenGL ripped out of
X and replaced with nVidia's stuff, this leads to a bit of an oops. nVidia is
actively working on the problem with reasonably frequent beta driver releases,
but it certainly appears to be way more deep rooted and trickier to handle
than it might appear.
If they could just open source the drivers, then an entire army of coders
would step in and help devise good code that runs well. But they don't, so
nVidia is stuck with the 2 maybe 3 people they have on the Linux port.
And there's also the fiasco with the construction of apparently their entire
line of recent GPUs. They don't react well to thermal stress and are failing
in alarmingly large numbers
I took quite a beating (on this list) for backing/promoting ATI,
because I believe that AMD would do the right thing for the Linux
community.
It appears you were more right than those others were wrong :-)
Thumbs up to AMD for taking the first steps and releasing some decent docs
I have not been keeping up with this news about the new Nvidia cards so
let me see if I get this right. I have a old FX-5200 card right now but
if I wanted to get a nice new video card, say a new puter build, then I
should get a ATI card instead?
Also, what is the latest card that has 2D in hardware? Sounds like
things went south not long after I got my 5200.
Dale
:-) :-)
