Nvidia vs ATI

[energyman]

and there last update for legacy drivers was in july.

[deanjo]

@deanjo

please read release notes of 71.86.07 - it does NOT support xserver 1.5 - the beta drivers for the rest do that. That's what i mean.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

compare to 96.43.09 where xserver 1.5 is mentioned:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122139

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1833710&postcount=4

[deanjo]

and there last update for legacy drivers was in july.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122139

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122423

[Kano]

Well you have to stay with Xserver 1.4.x or buy a new card. What's your choice

[energyman]

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117036

july

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122139

october - and if I remember correctly - no Xorg 1.5 support

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

october, but again no 1.5 support

[deanjo]

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117036
july

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122139

october - and if I remember correctly - no Xorg 1.5 support

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

october, but again no 1.5 support

As nvidia said, it's coming, just don't expect it soon. Supply vs demand.

[chrisr]

Well, that's easy enough to demonstrate...

And one thing I haven't seen so far with fglrx are xv caused X crashes.

Install fglrx.
Install xine.
Enable Xv for xine.
Use xine to play (e.g.) a movie trailer file.
The Xserver will crash when playback completes.

This has been true with every single version of fglrx I've ever tried on my laptop. And I've had this laptop about 18 months.

[energyman]

well, it hasn't been true for me. bad luck.

[Jorophose]

I think you can buy the lowend ATI cards when you want to use the open source driver. Running a highend card with those is more or less wasted money - until you use Win for gaming. fglrx is really problematic, especially with onboard solutions - and when you have got a laptop you have got lost completely when it does not work. The benchmarks with fglrx do not look so bad so you might think it is getting better, but when you want to watch a movie than the problems begin. Crashing X server when xv is used seems to be the normal case... nvidia has problems too from time to time and you have to use a fairly new card too to get more driver updates (geforce 2 gts or lower seem to have lost too with xserver 1.5+). VDPAU makes nvidia cards even more attractive - but you have to disable the composite extension to get rid of tearing, not all might want this. It is very interesting to see how fast projects began to use it, so hardware accelleration is really needed it seems...

I'd have to agree with Kano here.

High end on Linux: nVidia right now
Mid range on Linux: ATI or nVidia (depends where you play your games)
Low end: ATI or nVidia (but this doesn't really apply here)
MythFrontend: nVidia right now with VDPAU

(I thought the 780G had good linux support, though?...)

Of course, I lean more heavily on ATI at this point. nVidia cut a lot of corners and ignored a lot of X.org infrastructure to deliver their driver and ATI is trying to do it with all the normal components. It's one of those rare cases where it's everyone's fault (ATI for not delivering open drivers, nVidia for cutting out Xorg's components, XFree86 for being morons, XOrg for not properly fixing the problems, us for putting the blame on developpers (DEVELOPPERS DEVELOPPERS!!!)).

So yeah. I'd take the HD4670 for 100, Alex.

[t.s.]

Sorry, but nvidia drivers aren't stable. They're only reason why my Linux box hang sometimes. I wonder how nvidia drivers can have better performance than AMD/Ati - even vesa driver is usually faster than crap from nvidia in 2D (in KDE4 especially). They don't want to open their drivers, because they're not Open Source friendly. I never met with such crappy drivers - KDE 4 was unusable for more than half a year due to bugs and low performance in their drivers and it's still slow!

heheh... have you ever tried running linux 1.5 years ago on onboard chipset, like, radeon 200M? Yeah, they are 'STABLE'.. Easy install? yeah, 'of course'.

Oh, and I've been using KDE 3.5.x with my 8600GT on ubuntu 8.04 and have no problem so far, just one time driver error that easily fixed. Give them about 2 months and I'll surprised if there's still no fix for KDE 4.x from nvidia.

all nvidia cards below 6XXX are not supported anymore.

Well, at the time that my card, 8600GT, is not supported anymore, I most probably have another card (maybe ATI card if they continue their effort like now). But again, I think it's years ahead. And who know in the future nVidia --forced-- to open their source, no?

@ everybody that said: AMD is evil?
no... you're wrong! every VGA chipset makers (cmiiw) ARE EVIL! Do intel willingly open their source? nah.. I think that because they can't compete with ATI and nVidia on GPU power. So do VIA. Imagine that they have product that surpass both ATI and nVidia. Will they open their source? If we speak of today, maybe yes, but if we speak of 2 years past or more? nah...


...but of course, I have have money, I'll go for ATI too, for what they 'try to achieve' (but with 9600 GSO on my backup-tools)