Thomas J. Zeeman wrote:
The general experience with ATI and 3d acceleration of mordern cards is that its very poorly supported. ATI seems not to be commited to the providing a good driver for the Linux community. The current driver for ATI based cards for linux from ATI is limited to 32 bit, i386, and is no way comparable to the the Windows equivelent in terms of performance. Open source drivers for ATI based cards are beeing developed, but as the API for the ATI hardware is closed, these drivers does not support newer hardware capabilities.Hi, Ever since I got close to the stage where I wanted to upgrade my Matrox P650 with a Sledgehammer (pun intended) I am looking for experiences by others with ATI or nVidia cards, especially with the OSS-drivers (especially since ATI has stil not delivered an AMD64-enabled Linux-driver). Unfortunately posts about them are a bit rare it seems, especially for Debian. So I would like to hear some experiences from you people. I am mostly looking at an ATI 9200 card, but I would not mind about hearing experiences with 9600 series or nVidias 5200/5900XT series. thanx, Thomas
NVidia seems commited to providing a good driver for the Linux community. They provide the source to a kernel driver wrapper for a binary library. This is compilable with all major kernel versions (2.4.x, 2.6.x(.y)). Drivers are prodived for linux i386, x86_64, ia32, and for BSD i386 (IIRC). The drivers are on par with the Windows counterpart, and share the same codebase. Performance of the Linux drivers running 3D are equal or better than the Windows Driver. The drivers are quite stable.
My biased oppinion is that NVidia is the hardware to choose when running Linux. It works without flaws on my AMD K8, in both 64 and 32 bit emulation mode running Debian pure64/gcc-3.4 and on my Amd K7 32 bit mode only.
Regards Anders Fugmann