Wich driver? fglrx/radeon/radeonhd

[slanbarn]

Hi!

Cant decide if im going to buy a nVIDIA or ATI/AMD graphics card...
The ATI card im thinking of is based on the 3870hd chip, and the nVIDIA 9800GT...

I know this is the ATI/AMD part of this forum, so my question is:
Which driver(fglrx/radeon/radeonhd) offers the most complete support and performance, in both 2d(destop use, video playback using the 'xv' driver i guess) and 3d(the occasional game)?

edit2: Also, is there any configuring utility for any of the drivers for ATI/AMD cards like nVIDIAs 'nvidia-settings'

[Kano]

The 9800 GT = 8800 GT rebranded, i would go for 9800 GTX+.

[slanbarn]

Yeah I've heard that, but thing is that a 9800GT /w 512MB is cheaper than a 8800GT /w 512Mb, so I thought, well, 9800GT it is

The 9800GTX+ looks nice, although a bit more pricey, but hey.. It may be worth it

So, you would recomend the 9800GTX+ over the ATI 3870hd?

edit: Also just saw you where a debian dev. so have to say thanks for a really good and stable distrobution Will use this card with debian testing AMD64 when the time comes for purchase

[damentz]

I _would_ choose amd's cards, but they suffer from a few things that really do affect me.

1. Lazy kernel support, they're always a revision behind in support
2. Inaccurate opengl extension support - things like wine break and some games don't render correctly (penumbra)
3. Slow 2D with hardware compositing - compiz is snappy, but the applications being rendered do so pretty slowly
4. No aspect ratio scaling! Sucks with widescreen monitors.
5. Lazy kernel feature support - features enabled in the sidux kernel break compatibility with fglrx kernel interface while nvidia's still builds. (nvidia suffers from these too, but not to the same degree)

Shoot me, but these issues still irritate me to no end. But honestly, if most of these were fixed, nvidia's cards would look a lot less valueable. They're underpowered for their price and there is no fallback open source driver that can handle anything more than vesa can.

Which makes me wonder, what does the nv driver do more than monitor plug and play support? From what I hear, vesa is actually faster; kind of sad i think, but maybe the engineers they have writing code are pretty dim witted when 2d acceleration requests are thrown in their face.

[Melcar]

I would get a 9800GTX+ over a HD3870, but at the GTX+ price level I would consider a HD4850.