best card for open source driver?

[darkelf]

I want to change my machine soon, currently I am on AGP Radeon 9800 Pro, but want to switch to best possible card now on PCI-E.

The most important things to me are:

1) card should already work with released open source driver
2) it should be stable
3) it would be nice if it would be silent

I will probably choose r5xx, the fastest ones are 1950 XT but I know nothing about their stability with open source driver. Anyone is using it here?

Could you recommend silent card?

[Kano]

Only way: go for Intel onboard graphics Q35/Q45 (Q45 needs newer drivers, but should be no problem with next Linux distros). If needed you can put in a pci-e card later too.

[TechMage89]

Better yet, wait a few months and r600/r700 support should be forthcoming.

However, if you're not up to waiting that long (or need a complete OpenGL 2 stack now), Intel is probably your best bet until the ATI open source drivers get caught up.

I'm going to take a wild guess that the features and quality of the open-source ATI driver will be on par with the intel open-source driver in about 6 months- 1 year (that is to say, a complete, optimized OpenGL 2 stack and some sort of video decode accel). However, the ATI cards are much more powerful, so performance is going to be better on the ATI side even now.

I'd say if you need something that works now (for full OpenGL 2, 2d and basic 3d, up to about OpenGL 1.3 work fine on ATI at this point with r500 and r600/700 support is expected hopefully in a month or two), go with Intel. If you can afford to wait a bit, you might watch developments on the ATI front. It might be much faster than I predicted.

[stunted]

Could you recommend silent card?

If you can find an r300 or r400 based card they work well now with the older radeon driver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units

Actually the r400 stuff is hearsay as I don't have any but I have a bunch of r300 cards in PCIe and AGP variety's and as you have an Radeon 9800 Pro you know they aren't going to set the world on fire but they'll probably be faster than an Intel IGP.

[darkelf]

I bought Radeon 1950GT which is r5xx and works great with xf86-video-ati.

[stunted]

I bought Radeon 1950GT which is r5xx and works great with xf86-video-ati.

Does it, what version of the driver are you using (or what distro & release)

One problem I have with my r300s (and I think the same limitation applies to r400 GPUs) is the max texture size is 2048 x 2048 where as my desktop is 3520 x 1600 [0] so no eye candy for me, the r500s have a max texture size of 4096 x 4096 so even with my ludicrous desktop I'd get wobbly windows etc.. [1]

The only other thing I really care about is Xv video acceleration at 1920 wide, one day we'll get more help from the GPU but for the moment the Radeon HD3200 IGP on my new HTPCs don't even give Xv in Lenny so I've put a pair of really cheap and nasty X1050s in, do you get Xv off your r500?

Thanks, the X1050s can't really play games so I'd like to upgrade them if I could.

[0] new 24" LCD @ 1920 x 1200 + very old 22" iiyama Vision Master Pro510 CRT @ 1600 x 1200 the CRT still has better colour so when I'm photo editing I have the actual picture on the CRT and the tools on the LCD

[1] actually the wobbly window bit doesn't bother me but I do quite like the 3d task switching, even when your Alt Tabing having a visual reminder of what aplication you want is usefull.

[darkelf]

I used Radeon 9100 (r200), Radeon 9800 Pro (r3xx) and now Radeon 1950GT (r5xx), all works with open source driver.

Currently I use Arch Linux with packages from [testing] (Mesa 7.2), I haven't compiled anything myself.

Enemy Territory, NeverBall, Blender and my own OpenGL code works.

[stunted]

Currently I use Arch Linux with packages from [testing] (Mesa 7.2), I haven't compiled anything myself.

Mmm that's 6.9.0-4

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/testing/x86_64/xf86-video-ati/

Lenny's on 6.9.0-1

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/xserver-xorg-video-ati

I'll read up on what's crept in over those 3 revisions.

How about Xv video scaling?

[darkelf]

Xv works perfectly, I haven't noticed any problems.
The difference is probably Mesa version, it requires 7.2 (xf86-video-ati is build from Mesa!).

[elanthis]

Mmm that's 6.9.0-4

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/testing/x86_64/xf86-video-ati/

Lenny's on 6.9.0-1

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/xserver-xorg-video-ati

I'll read up on what's crept in over those 3 revisions.

The number after the dash is the package revision number, and not part of the versioning of the driver itself. The package revision numbers are meaningless here, as you're comparing packages from two different distributions. They could both be 6.9.0-4 and still have different patches applied, or the two revisions in question could be built from identical code.