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From: Nico Kadel-Garcia on 24 Jan 2010 23:41
On Jan 24, 6:19 pm, David Brown
<david.br...(a)hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote:
> Darren Salt wrote:
> > I demand that Mark Hobley may or may not have written...
>
> > [snip]
> >> Stick with open source compatible cards would be my suggestion here .....
>
> >> Choose Intel or ATI
>
> > That would be just ATI, then, unless you're counting motherboards as graphics
> > cards... ;-)
>
> How good are the ATI open source and closed source drivers?  My rough
> understanding is that with the closed source NVidia drivers, you get
> similar performance for similar tasks under Windows or Linux - in other
> words, if you can live with binary drivers, you get what you pay for
> with NVidia whether you choose Windows or Linux.

Until it bites you in the behind, hard. Take a look at the NVidia
installation scripts: those are extremely clumsy and make wildly
invalid assumptions about which driver you're installing, and where to
set aside the system-provided files and how to provide them. They're
quite nasty, and they *will* break your X setup when you do normal
updates of the Mesa libraries, which they silently replace without
notifying your package management. Why do they do this? So that, like
Sun's Java installers, they can try to force you to sign off on their
user agreement by typing "yes" at install time, which violates .deb
and .rpm tools and most especially yum and synaptic. SuSE manages to
handle a consistently out-of-date driver by bundling it into YaST, but
it's a serious problem if you want to update and don't know enough to
revert the drivers before installing new ones.

> What's the situation with ATI?  How does performance compare between
> Windows, Linux with the open source drivers, and Linux with ATI's closed
> source drivers?  What about features and stability?  I don't mind if
> there's a bit of performance drop by using the open source ATI drivers
> as long as it's not a huge difference, but I like to have features
> working (such as multiple monitor support, and high quality graphics)
> and stability is obviously important.

Depends on the card and the setup. As mentioned, I liked the ATI 9200
series of cards, but haven't tried a hot graphics card on Linux this
year.
From: Mark Hobley on 26 Jan 2010 18:08
The Natural Philosopher <tnp(a)invalid.invalid> wrote:
> I managed to get my Intel onboard 'cheap as chips'set to work reasonably
> well using the latest kernels. 2.6.26 didn't cut it, 2.6.30 did.

You need to test the 3d really. Try playing Enemy Territory, and some GL
based games.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

From: Mark Hobley on 26 Jan 2010 18:08
David Brown <david.brown(a)hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote:

> How good are the ATI open source and closed source drivers?

On the older ATI cards (9200), the open source 3d works just fine, as do the
Intel chipsets with the open source driver. You can play 3d games, just fine.
(Just like you can in Microsoft Windows).

I haven't done any testing with closed source drivers, because this is outside
of my area of interest. (I am a programmer, so I must have open source drivers
or appropriate technical specifications to produce them.)

> What's the situation with ATI? How does performance compare between
> Windows, Linux with the open source drivers, and Linux with ATI's closed
> source drivers?

I have only tested the older cards, though I think a guy on the internet is
testing the newer R300 cards, but when I checked last year, he reported some
problems with these so the 9200 was still the best card for open source.

You could buy a motherboard with onboard Intel graphics. These work well with
open source drivers.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

From: The Natural Philosopher on 26 Jan 2010 20:12
Mark Hobley wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp(a)invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> I managed to get my Intel onboard 'cheap as chips'set to work reasonably
>> well using the latest kernels. 2.6.26 didn't cut it, 2.6.30 did.
>
> You need to test the 3d really. Try playing Enemy Territory, and some GL
> based games.
>
Sheesh dude, no I dont. I've got far too much to do.

> Mark.
>
From: Darren Salt on 28 Jan 2010 11:42
I demand that The Natural Philosopher may or may not have written...

> David Brown wrote:
>> Bit Twister wrote:
[snip]
>>> Another place to look, http://www.free3d.org/
>> Unless that site is biased, it looks like ATI is the best choice when
>> using only open source drivers - the best Nvidia scores were alongside
>> cheap Intel integrated devices.

It looks outdated to me.

> I managed to get my Intel onboard 'cheap as chips'set to work reasonably
> well using the latest kernels. 2.6.26 didn't cut it, 2.6.30 did.

I found that Mesa 7.2 or newer is required for 3D, or at least a few specific
3D operations. Otherwise, fine.

My Radeon X300 needs to have Mesa configured with low-impact fallbacks
switched off (enable the "disable…" option using driconf); if you don't do
this, anti-aliased line drawing is enabled and that's *slow* (done using
software rendering, I shouldn't wonder).

If you're using KMS on Intel hw and you're using 2.6.32, boot with
i915.powersave=0 to avoid possible display problems after suspend.

[snip]
--
| Darren Salt | linux at youmustbejoking | nr. Ashington, | Doon
| using Debian GNU/Linux | or ds ,demon,co,uk | Northumberland | Army
| + http://www.xine-project.org/

All great discoveries are made by accident.
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