Which Card for Vsync Desktop and perfect 2D?

[pablored]

In building my new PC I have so far bought two graphics cards.

1/ ATI 3650 512MB
2/ Nvidia 7600GT

The Nvidia was bought after I found that open source ATI did not mean working in the here and now. It's funny, I had sworn off the brand forever after an ATI Expert 98, but the open source talk had me back at the door. Good for them, a sale... and a product in a box in the user's home waiting on a dream.

Anyway... the Nvidia is better but still not perfect. In moving windows horizontally there is tearing of the border. This occurs in every WM except hardware accelerated compiz.

My question is this. Is there a card out there in Linux land that can play movies, snes games, and have a non-tearing silky desktop?

I've switched to Awesome WM so it is less of an issue, but I spend time in E17 and Fluxbox as well. This Quad PC should be capable of outdoing the G5 iMac I got rid of.

[EagleDM]

Hardware features in Linux are not in par in AMD in contrast to NVIDIA.

AMD has no way (still today) to perfectly vsync the desktop, no matter what card you use, they are limited to the DRI funcionality, but you have a promise of better drivers and OpenSource variation, which NVIDIA does not.


With NVIDIA all is considerably better, you have functioning VSync, you don't get flashes in Videos and 3D and because of NVIDIA does some tricks in their closed source drivers, you have the 3D rendering in a window which AMD has no way to fix until DRI2 becomes mainstream.

Hard choice, I don't like current gen NVIDIA cards at all, but I don't like current state of ATI drivers either.

In Vista is a whole new different aprouch, NVIDIA drivers really s.uck big time and are responsable for my numerous crashes and blue screens until I switched to ATI HD4870 and all was glorious, so, Vista support is better on the ATI hand, Linux support is better on NVIDIA side, you choose

[pablored]

I was using gentoo/debian with an MX400 a year or so ago and can't remember if I had tearing when dragging windows around. I think maybe I had 'display window contents when dragging' disabled, and put any glitches down to a lack of processor power.

Do all graphics cards have tearing when moving windows, when compiz is disabled? Is this an xserver (xfree/xorg) thing?

[curaga]

My Intel and Matrox cards do not have any tearing; not with 2d, not with Xfwm4's compositing on..