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Re: what graphics card to choose

On 07/30/2012 03:25 AM, Gary Dale wrote:

On 30/07/12 03:04 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

hvw59601<hvw59601<at>  care2.com>  writes:


Camaleón wrote:

On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 10:41:00 -0400, Michael P. Soulier wrote:


Then choose one that you like (because of price/design) and then check
about its current support status in Linux ecosystem, though I would go
for nvidia; their closed source driver (sigh...) is rather good.


Indeed it is.

Hugo
Actually, right now, the nVidia-provided nVidia driver packaged in Debian has a number of problems with 3D support on several cards. For example I use an nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ which is 2-3 years old -- in other words, neither old nor bleeding edge -- and 3D support is completely broken right now and has been since the last working version at 290.10. You can get a Gnome 3 session going but once you start to exercise the graphics subsystem, eg watching a video, playing a 3D game, even just exercising the Gnome eye candy heavily, the X session locks up completely and only a reboot will return your machine to you. I am currently running Gnome-classic which works fine with the nVidia driver. The problem seems to be upstream as opposed to in the Debian packaging, but nVidia themselves are less than anxious to solve the problem it seems. If you are buying a new system I'd stay away from nVidia cards for now, even though they are good cards generally, because of the uncerainty about whether a given card will work properly even with the proprietary driver. But check out the nVidia website -- once they find and solve this problem, I'd personally go back to 
recommending nVidia chipsets.

HTH

Mark
Yet another reason why open source is important. NVidia might not be interested/able to solve the problem, but I'm sure the open source community could.
This is why it'd be great to see Nouveau take supporting hardware-accelerated OpenGL more seriously. And clean up on some of the other issues.
KMS is a wonderful feature, but I personally would rather see good OpenGL support than KMS, though. Nouveau's getting there, but it's support for OpenGL (Through Gallium.) isn't really mature enough yet. I also get some odd mouse-stuttering when I use Nouveau.
Until this is "fixed," I elect to use nVidia's official drivers, which I personally haven't had any issues with to date.
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