Re: Upgrading video card: Best of these three?
There are those who would have you believe that Kristian Rink wrote:
>
> > Any other sugestions appreciated. I left off the NVIDIA 5or close to it)
> > crds because the GeForce2 seem to prefer XF 4.0x.
That is true.
>
> Basically, nvidia`s chipsets (at least for TNT2 I tried) also are
>supported by XF 3.3.6 and utah-glx... Besides this, after trying out
>for several times, I don't at all recommend running nvidia-based cards
>in XF 4.x for the following reasons:
>
> (a) NVIDIAs drivers for those cards (even while being fast) are
>obviously still *very* unreliable, which (at least with my TNT2 board)
>caused several severe crashes of the x-server (especially while
>running "gears" or other of those problems with -root option set, and
>while trying to switch to the text console and back to X again).
I've used NVidia's drives with both TNT2 and GeForce 2 cards and
haven't found this at all. In fact, on my desktop system at home I
have more problems with the Win2000 drivers than the Linux ones. Your
problems could be a hardware issue; there are many older (i.e. more
than 18 months or so) motherboards that don't supply enough power to
the AGP port and this can cause problems with NVidia's cards.
However, it is true that they are beta drivers and if you require 100%
stability you shouldn't use them (of course, you shouldn't be playing
Quake either ;-).
> (b) besides that, those drivers are binary-only and they seem to
>have some problems with certain 2.4.0-testx kernels (don`t know if
>they fixed by now). Installation seems to be difficult sometimes due
>to unresolved conflicts with installed MESA-version while using those
>drivers on systems which are not RedHat-based (because nvidia only are
>offering .rpm - packages and `generic` archives as .tar.gz ...).
The binary module is a problem and does force users to rely on NVidia
keeping up to date on kernel developments. Of course both the drivers
and the 2.4 kernel are in beta, and combining beta products often
seems to multiply problems. Once again, if stability is important,
then don't use 2.4.
I haven't found installation difficult. The readmes contain very
specific and complete instructions for installing the drivers. The
only problem I've run in to was a system that was missing a directory
(I don't remember which) and the install scripts just assumed that it
existed. The error messages made it quite obvious what went wrong
and it was easy enough to fix.
> (c) nvidia still is not very cooperative in providing the developers
>of `open` driver systems with information, that's why utah-glx is
>still very much slower than their native drivers because it`s not
>possible for those to use DMA on that card. This is why I am tending
>to ask people to please DO NOT SUPPORT companies like nvidia and their
>attempt of bringing proprietary drivers to Linux... Thank You!
This is a good point. However, since they make good hardware I'm
willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now that their
current open-source efforts are in transition and that they are
working in good faith to resolve any licensing issues or other
problems that are preventing them from releasing fully open drivers.
A year from now I'll probably feel differently. The truth is that
right now you don't have many options. ATI cards don't even compare
in terms of 3D performance (with the possible exception of the Radeon,
but IIRC it's not supported by the Linux drivers yet), and Matrox' and
3dfx' cards will end up costing much more for a similar level (and ATI
is on my sh!t list until I can get hardware OpenGL support on my
laptop; llxdoom is OK, but I want Quake 3, dammit ;-). Without good
drivers, there will be very few games. Without games, the number of
Linux users will be limited, and there will never be a reason for video
hardware manufacturers to go out of their way to support open source
or free software.
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