Nvidia vs ATI

[kraftman]

eventhough, I still recommend nVidia over ATI, like others. IMHO, I think nVidia still won't open their driver cause they know they have none this far that can match their driver performance/stability. So, when nVidia open their driver, it is a signal for us to buy ATI card, heheh.

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!

[Kano]

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...

[energyman]

em, all nvidia cards below 6XXX are not supported anymore. And one thing I haven't seen so far with fglrx are xv caused X crashes. vt switching X crashes - yes. Xv not. And after seeing the big energy penalty on the vt, I certainly won't use it anymore if there is a way around it.

[deanjo]

em, all nvidia cards below 6XXX are not supported anymore. And one thing I haven't seen so far with fglrx are xv caused X crashes. vt switching X crashes - yes. Xv not. And after seeing the big energy penalty on the vt, I certainly won't use it anymore if there is a way around it.

Horsecrap. Nvidia maintains drivers going all the way back to TNT's. Legacy does not equal unmaintained.

Riva TNT, TNT2, GeForce, and some GeForce 2 GPU 71.86.07 Released 10-29-08

GeForce 2 through GeForce 4 series 96.43.09 Released 10-29-08

GeForce 5 series 173.14.15 Released 11-03-08

[RealNC]

until you use Win for gaming.

Please, don't refer to it as "Win". Really.

[energyman]

'legacy' means unmaintained, if no new features are added or you have to wait many month for new kernels to be supported - and support for newer X may never come.

[Melcar]

em, all nvidia cards below 6XXX are not supported anymore. And one thing I haven't seen so far with fglrx are xv caused X crashes. vt switching X crashes - yes. Xv not. And after seeing the big energy penalty on the vt, I certainly won't use it anymore if there is a way around it.

Xine + Xv crashes all the time on my 200M. Gstreamer works fine though, which is what I use almost all the time.

[mattmatteh]

Please, don't refer to it as "Win". Really.

i have to agree, i hate that.

[deanjo]

'legacy' means unmaintained, if no new features are added or you have to wait many month for new kernels to be supported - and support for newer X may never come.

Legacy does not mean unmaintained. Legacy in the case of nvidia and many other hardware manufacturers means obsolete hardware. The kernel for example is plastered full of legacy hardware but support for those devices goes on and is updated if required to maintain a working condition. A gravis ultrasound for example is legacy but it's drivers are still maintained to be in a working order even in the latest kernel.

[Kano]

@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