Graphics cards for Linux
in [Setup]
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From: David Brown on 24 Jan 2010 17:36 Bit Twister wrote: > On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:15:24 +0100, David Brown wrote: >> I have /heard/ that with a modern Nvidia card, the open source drivers >> are still very limited, while the binary drivers are very good. On the >> other hand, for modern ATI cards, both the open source drivers and the >> binary drivers are sort of middle-of-the-road. Thus for open source >> only, ATI is the best choice - when you are willing to use binary >> drivers, Nvidia comes out best. > > Heheh, I am thinking about not buying ATI ever again. > RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board) Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850 > all I could get was somewhere below 60 FPS using teapot. > > Went an bought a > RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] Module: Card:ATI Radeon HD 2000 and later (radeon/fglrx) > teapot gave me 142 FPS on mandriva 2010.0. > > Installed mandriva 2010.1 Alpha1. Can only get 60.14 FPS max. Downloaded > ATI driver. Would not even run. > > 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.
From: David Brown on 24 Jan 2010 18:00 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > On Jan 22, 3:32 pm, Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettri...(a)aol.com> wrote: >> David Brown schrieb: >> >>> I have /heard/ that with a modern Nvidia card, the open source drivers >>> are still very limited, while the binary drivers are very good. On the >>> other hand, for modern ATI cards, both the open source drivers and the >>> binary drivers are sort of middle-of-the-road. Thus for open source >>> only, ATI is the best choice - when you are willing to use binary >>> drivers, Nvidia comes out best. Do you think that is a reasonable >>> summary, or have I been reading the wrong web sites? >> The point is: most graphics cards manufacturers don't want to publish >> the tricks, built into their cards, by offering open-source drivers. >> Thus it doesn't make sense to buy a high-performance card, and use it >> with an crippled open-source driver. > > Only if it's built-into an otherwise useful system, or you anticipate > the open source drivers being completed in the near future. Take a > look at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ for some details on open > source NVidia drivers. That website confirms my suspicions about open source drivers for NVidia - they are apparently unable to do much 3D acceleration at the moment.
From: Shadow on 24 Jan 2010 18:15 On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:08:25 +0100, David Brown <david(a)westcontrol.removethisbit.com> wrote: >Any thoughts or experiences would be appreciated. OK. Never, ever, buy anything with SIS graphics. They filter any email with "linux" in it, or at least, appear to. Support is nihil. Personally, I use nvidia. 2 radeons had premature deaths with me. But that was some time ago (both were 9*** series) []'s > >David
From: David Brown on 24 Jan 2010 18:19 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. 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.
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. |