Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Camaleón wrote:On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:54:53 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:On 2009-12-14 13:28 +0100, Camaleón wrote:Be sure to avoid Nvidia graphics cards then.Why? There is "nv" driver (2D) and soon it will be "nouveau" (2D+3D) driver available. Both are open source.The nv driver is heavily obfuscated¹ and, perhaps more importantly, itlacks some very basic features.[snip]It seems we have not many real choices, then :-(
[...]
FWIW, I gave up on using the ati drivers for my card, because I could not be bothered with all the bugs and with having to reinstall and configure it on every new kernel version. So ATI are another brand, I'd recommend to avoid. From what I read, the overall hassle is generally far less on using Intel cards. YMMV, of course and not all models of any manufacturer behave the same...
I also gave up on ATI's proprietary 'fglrx' driver several years ago, exactly because it doesn't work as advertised: it seemed to be more like a practical joke on users than a functional device driver.
So, when I built a new desktop machine in 2007 I bought an NVidia card: a GeForce 7950 GT. I was happy with its performance, and was annoyed with jumping through the hoops to keep the proprietary 'nvidia' driver up to date... but at least those drivers work. (Usually.)
But then it turned out that NVidia had released two generations of defective parts -- GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 -- and got their rear ends sued off. My own GeForce 7950 GT died on me this past summer, just a few months ago... barely a 2-year old card.
In the meantime, I had been following the new developments with the open source ATI drivers. I noticed that within 6 months of the initial release of documentation by AMD/ATI, users of those cards were reporting that video was working better with the open source drivers than with 'fglrx'. I decided then that my next card would have to be ATI... and when the 7950 GT died, I was even more motivated to switch to ATI.
I've had a Radeon HD 4850 for a couple of months now. Basic 2D support is just fine. Acceleration (both 2D and 3D) on my generation of cards has just appearing recently -- and I have been fighting/playing with cutting edge source code, including upstream kernels, upstream Mesa and libdrm libraries, and upstream X drivers (radeonhd, radeon) -- with very positive results.
Progress on 3 fronts -- DRM in the kernel, 3D support in Mesa, and advances in the 'radeon' driver ('radeonhd' is now lagging behind, and is probably doomed) -- is very rapid. At the beginning of November, OpenGL support was corrupt and useless on my card. By mid-November, fixes in 'radeon' and Mesa gave me nice accelerated 2D/3D for simple desktop activity, video, and non-demanding OpenGL games. At the moment, I am trying to triage a Mesa bug which is causing the more demanding OpenGL games to suddenly die and disappear (though not crashing X), and I believe that before the end of 2009 I will have a completely functional 2D/3D support for this card.
So, after years of preferring NVidia over ATI, I am actually recommending for folks to switch to ATI (or Intel, if they don't care about good 3D acceleration) because of their demonstration of support for open source drivers and, now, because those drivers are actually working quite well. All of the hassles with building upstream source code I have been dealing with lately will be gone by Q1 2010, and merely using stable packages from ordinary repositories will give me ATI support that Just Works!
IMHO, very good time to be using, or switching to, ATI! Just my 2 cents, Dave W.