Following on from the riveting IP45 chipset thread,
I also have to decide on my graphics card for my new rig. I'm not a
gamer so any new card around £30/$60 or less will probably suit my
needs.

I'm used to 'managing' the 'nvidia' drivers on Linux. but I get
the impression that the ATI drivers are now more open, but maybe
nvidia closed drivers still give better performance?

Any opinions on this?

Cheers,
Lordy

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:58:50 +0000, lordy wrote:

> Following on from the riveting IP45 chipset thread,
> I also have to decide on my graphics card for my new rig. I'm not a
> gamer so any new card around £30/$60 or less will probably suit my
> needs.
>
> I'm used to 'managing' the 'nvidia' drivers on Linux. but I get
> the impression that the ATI drivers are now more open, but maybe
> nvidia closed drivers still give better performance?
>
> Any opinions on this?

There is no difference in performance. That shouldn't be a concern for
you anyway, as you state you are not a gamer.

It's quite simple, really. ATI drivers suck, and Nvidia drivers work
nearly perfectly. Who gives a shit whether they're "open" or not? They
work better. That's the bottom line.


--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org

On Sunday 13 July 2008 05:46, someone who identifies as *Dan C* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.mandriva:/

> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:58:50 +0000, lordy wrote:
>
>> Following on from the riveting IP45 chipset thread,
>> I also have to decide on my graphics card for my new rig. I'm not a
>> gamer so any new card around £30/$60 or less will probably suit my
>> needs.
>>
>> I'm used to 'managing' the 'nvidia' drivers on Linux. but I get
>> the impression that the ATI drivers are now more open, but maybe
>> nvidia closed drivers still give better performance?
>>
>> Any opinions on this?
>
> There is no difference in performance. That shouldn't be a concern for
> you anyway, as you state you are not a gamer.
>
> It's quite simple, really. ATI drivers suck, and Nvidia drivers work
> nearly perfectly. Who gives a shit whether they're "open" or not?

I take it that /lordy/ means that now that AMD (which owns ATi) has
announced that they intend to open up the driver code, ATi drivers may soon
be of equal or better quality than their nVidia counterparts, thanks to the
higher quality of open source versus closed, proprietary code.

However (to the OP), AMD has to wait with opening up those drivers until
they have totally rewritten (from scratch) all of the pieces of that driver
code that are currently still covered by ATi's proprietary license due to
patented technology.

> They work better. That's the bottom line.

For a (long) while still, yes. At this stage, ATi drivers suck bigtime,
both in quality and in ease of installation.

On this machine here, I have a screenshot taken on my dual Xeon machine
which had an ATi card. It is of the same desktop (Mandrake 10.0 PowerPack,
KDE 3.2) - with the exact same wallpaper - a modified "Only_K.jpg", which
came with the distribution's KDE artwork and which I have given a deep blue
hue and enlarged to 1600 x 1200 pixels - and that screenshot looks like
crap. The blue is much darker and lifeless, and the yellow center of the
KDE cogwheel looks like a piece of cheese that's been out in the sun too
long.

Again to the OP: if you don't need *any* 3D functionality - and this
includes the use of Compiz or Beryl as a window manager - then you may even
want to try the /nv/ driver in X.Org. If you use the freely downloadable
version of Mandriva, the installer will set that one up for you by default,
and it'll be just as adequate then. It does normally support DPMS (which
the VESA framebuffer driver does not).


--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)

lordy wrote:
> Following on from the riveting IP45 chipset thread,
> I also have to decide on my graphics card for my new rig. I'm not a
> gamer so any new card around £30/$60 or less will probably suit my
> needs.
>
> I'm used to 'managing' the 'nvidia' drivers on Linux. but I get
> the impression that the ATI drivers are now more open, but maybe
> nvidia closed drivers still give better performance?
>
> Any opinions on this?

What I read says "the newest" ATI cards and drivers are in some ways
better than "the newest" nVidia cards and drivers, but that is
generally with respect to use under M$ OS.

"The newest" nVidia cards that were expected to leapfrog ATI
again are not panning out as well as expected. Not that they
are shabby, just that they are not the leap forward some expected.

The real test will come in a year or two, when people have had
a chance to create drivers for ATI cards using previously
undisclosed specifications, and nVidia's "next" newest cards arrive.

For the moment, if you are going high end, just get the newest
from either, no big difference. If the software was written
in earlier times, nVidia is the choice. ATI had problems.

Cheers!

jim b.

--
UNIX is not user unfriendly; it merely
expects users to be computer-friendly.

On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:22:19 -0400, Jim Beard wrote:

>> I also have to decide on my graphics card for my new rig. I'm not a
>> gamer so any new card around £30/$60 or less will probably suit my
>> needs.

<snip>

> For the moment, if you are going high end, just get the newest
> from either, no big difference. If the software was written
> in earlier times, nVidia is the choice. ATI had problems.

Based on his statement there above, it's quite clear he isn't going "high
end"....


--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org