On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Bryce Harrington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 05:07:05PM +1000, Christopher Halse Rogers wrote: >> On 6/25/08, Markus Hitter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > probably some of you already read that statement of kernel developers >> > about the opening of graphics drivers: <https:// >> > www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Kernel_Driver_Statement> >> > >> > Currently I'm using Intel's integrated graphics (G965, G31), but I'm >> > about to upgrade to a "real" graphics card. >> > >> > Which vendor should I prefer (or stay with the G31) in order to >> > support proper open source graphics drivers? Is there a >> > contraindication if I want to use CUDA-like technologies (I'm doing >> > FEA, CFD) ? >> > >> For high-performance graphics cards you're pretty much limited to ATI >> or nVidia. This makes the choice nice and easy: ATI/AMD have released >> specs, and employ at least one Xorg developer. nVidia have done >> neither, and (unsurprisingly) haven't responded to nouveau's >> request(s) for documentation. > > As a slight correction, actually Aaron Plattner, the current maintainer > of the open source -nv driver, has been employed by nVidia for a while > now. (I couldn't say whether he has other duties at nVidia besides > maintain -nv or if it is his full time job.) > > But I would concur that -ati seems to be a good bit further along than > -nv at present.
One caveat is that the OpenGL* performance of ATI cards has been quite poor, although apparently the introduction of a programmable memory controller since the X1800 XT has resulted in OpenGL competitive with nVidia, see e.g.: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reports/atiopenglupdate/ (*and even if you use "DirectX" in wine, you are still going to use the OpenGL driver and will still get poor performance). > In fact, while -ati still has a ways to go before it's a suitably > complete replacement for -fglrx, it's been making such good progress > that I think we can reasonably foresee a day when we start talking about > moving -fglrx out of main over to multiverse or something. Back in my day the nvidia drivers just worked whereas the ATI drivers (also closed source) just didn't. When I realized that an Intel GMA simply wouldn't cut it even for casual use, I plugged in an old nVidia 6600GT. Given that the drivers and support seems to have improved dramatically, ATI seems like it may be a good choice when buying a new card. :) -- John C. McCabe-Dansted PhD Student University of Western Australia -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
