Recommended laptop grapics card?

[Vadi]

Hi all,

I'm looking to get a new laptop, and the graphics card will be a largely deciding factor. Poking about Phoronix and the net only taught me that nVidia has very confusing naming system (same numbers, different letters can mean a big difference), and I'm not sure which of the many brands ATI has work well in Linux.

I'll be planning on using Ubuntu 7.10, 64bit. Can someone knowledgeable in this field please give me a short list of some graphics card they can recommend? (Need more than one, since I might not be able to find a laptop with that specific card)

Thank you!

Edit: Poking about, there's a similar thread in the general hardware section, but that one is for desktops :/

[Karel]

Hi all,

I'm looking to get a new laptop, and the graphics card will be a largely deciding factor. Poking about Phoronix and the net only taught me that nVidia has very confusing naming system (same numbers, different letters can mean a big difference), and I'm not sure which of the many brands ATI has work well in Linux.

I'll be planning on using Ubuntu 7.10, 64bit. Can someone knowledgeable in this field please give me a short list of some graphics card they can recommend? (Need more than one, since I might not be able to find a laptop with that specific card)

Thank you!

Edit: Poking about, there's a similar thread in the general hardware section, but that one is for desktops :/

Avoid ATI/AMD, the drivers are a bad joke - they improved over the years, but it's the same difference as between a huge and a small pile of sh** - both stink. If you don't need extra performance, buy something with Intel graphic cards, if you need some performance, buy nVidia.

[Vadi]

Alrighty. Would nVidia 512 MB GeForce 8600M GT be OK?

[Svartalf]

I wouldn't know about the G80 series parts with respects to overall performance- I don't have anything G80 based. Only G60 based and G70 based parts.

I do know that I've been satisfied with the overall performance of the 7600GT in my desktop and the Go7600 on my laptop. I do know that if it's on the supported list from NVidia on their driver, it'll be at least moderately better than a goodly portion of the AMD/ATI offerings right at the moment, if only in the regards that most everything seems to work as advertised with the NVidia part.

The same, unfortunately, can't be said of AMD.

If you've got one of the good parts (Pretty much any R600 on their support list would be that...), you will have serviceable 3D support, but the 2D performance and some aspects of 3D won't work for you. They're missing some key ARB extension interfaces, and there's a few other aspects of the drivers that cause 2D rendering slowdowns.

[Vadi]

Right. So, it's just way too early for ATI yet.

[Svartalf]

That'd be my take on things. If they had more robust drivers or the technical info needed for the community to largely make our own and we'd done so, this would be a different story, I suspect. But for now, unless you're willing to go down a rather rocky road with the stuff, you're going to want to pick the mid-to-high end NVidia options for performance on a laptop at this time.