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Re: Accelerated video cards and non-free firmware



On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 16:28 -0500, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking at getting a video card, and I want to know what video card
> that has 3D acceleration to get.  Normally I'd ask on -users but as the
> subject says I want to know what video cards will still have
> acceleration when the non-free firmware is removed from the kernel,
> which is supposed to happen for squeeze.
> 
> I had heard that the ATI cards, which would normally be my first
> choice, have non-free firmware in the driver, which may be removed.  Is
> this true, and if so what accelerated cards will have have acceleration
> once non-free firmware is removed.
[...]

The firmware used for 3D acceleration in the r128 (ATI Rage 128), radeon
(ATI Radeon) and mga (Matrox G200/G400/G550) drivers is non-free and
will be moved from the linux-image packages into a new firmware-linux
package starting with Linux 2.6.29.

The free drivers for Intel and Nvidia graphics hardware should support
3D acceleration without the need for non-free firmware.  I'm not sure
that any of the free graphics drivers have great 3D performance though.

Ben.

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