On Friday 24 July 2009 06:57:19 Omer Zak wrote: > I am looking for advice about selecting motherboard and graphic card/s > for a new PC which I plan to acquire; and about suppliers available to > Israelis (whereas in Israel or abroad).
Well, of the three major brands of graphic cards for PCs: 1. Intel-based graphic cards are fully supported (2-D/3-D effects) with full- fledged open-source drivers and more recently open specifications. However, they are always integrated on the motherboard and cannot be bought separately. I've heard reports of Intel-based cards causing many problems with latest kernels and/or X11s, but I believe and hope these problems will be resolved. 2. ATI-based cards have the proprietary fglrx driver, and the open-source radeon and radeonhd drivers. The open-source drivers don't support 3-D effects on many cards yet (or at least didn't, last time I checked). I have an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro card, which I'm using with the radeonhd drivers and the system is rock solid. It does not do 3-D yet. I had this problem recently: https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=51723 but it seems to affect nvidia cards too, and I was able to resolve it by disabling compositing. Note that ATI have released a lot of specifications for their cards and actively support the open-source drivers effort. 3. Nvidia cards have the nv driver (which is technically open-source, but written in hex, and does not do 3-D), the proprietary "nvidia" driver (which has caused me and others many problems and continuously drops support for older cards) and the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouvaeu driver. Nvidia has not released any specifications for their cards and are notorious for their general antipathy of the FOSS ideals. See also: http://www.lockergnome.com/linux/2009/07/06/nvidia-chooses-windows-ce/ ------------------ To sum up, I think at the moment your best bet is Intel with ATI being a second-best choice. Some ATI cards are probably better supported than others. I suggest you boycott Nvidia for their general antagonism and bad treatment of anything free software stands for. Regards, Shlomi Fish > > My requirement for the new PC is that it is to render quickly graphics > and data visualizations of large data sets, and to run under Linux with > as little non-Free software as possible. Ability to number-crunch would > be nice, as well. > > The budget allows me to afford an high-end system (but not a > supercomputer). > > If you have experience in the above, please write to the mailing list or > contact me in private. > > --- Omer -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
