On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 12:49:02PM +0100, Alan Chandler wrote: > I am planning on building myself a new computer from scratch, probably based > on the new Intel Core 2 Duo chips, and am seeking opinions on the best > graphics chipset/card that I should use. Basic criteria are as follows > > 1) Must be open source driver (under linux) > 2) Some 3D capability - but not necessarily the fastest, but expect to run > the following in the future (not particularly tried any of these yet) > - Flight Gear > - Blender > - KDE4 > > I currently am running a Gigabyte Radeon 9200 - which seems just about ideal > as it has the R200 chipset which seems fully supported. I would have liked > to carry it over to my new machine. Unfortunately > a) It has an AGP interface - newer motherboards seem to be PCI-E > b) My favoured Hardware Supplier (http://www.dabs.com) don't seem to stock > any graphics cards with this chipset as its far too old. > > My current exploration around this subject doesn't seem to get a very clear > opinion. Most reviews seem to concentrate on ATI or Nvidia chipsets, with > the requirement that I would then have to choose the binary drivers from > these two manufactures. This is something I would like to avoid. > > Looking for alternatives at the dri.sourceforge.net web site, the chipsets > with full support, mainly seem to be the older ones, with possibly Intel > and Matrox offerings. Not sure I understand the detail - but this seems to > mean a motherboard with an intel chipset, or get a Matrox G5500 separate > card. What are don't really know is will these be sufficiently performant > for the tasks I need it for. > > What can this list advise? Of the modern graphics chips, the Intel chips are the best supported in open source as their complete drivers are in the Linux kernel and in X. The other two choices, nVidia and ATi, both require proprietary drivers to get any semblance of decent performance. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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