ati 5770 or still a nvidia

[crazycheese]

Why would you buy anything but the cheapest card (best use onboard vga) for OSS drivers? You lose so much when you want to play demanding games that it would be absolutely useless to spend money on that. Cheap cards are enough for xv and if needed compiz but not for serious gaming, which is impossible with OSS drivers anyway. Did you see Unigine Heaven running on em?

60fps on 1920x1080 maxed out OpenArena are playable.

[Kano]

Amazing, you still see a game with a 11 y old game engine as reference - must be a joke.

[Hoodlum]

2d OSS drivers working by default in fedora 13 for anyone that is interested. At the current rate of development it looks like 3d OSS drivers will be ready for F14.

[crazycheese]

Amazing, you still see a game with a 11 y old game engine as reference - must be a joke.

And you still use 19 y old operating system - must be a joke too.

[Kano]

That has nothing to do with games. Certainly you can only benchmark games that run with oss drivers, so the collection is very limited. I would NEVER buy a card which is not lowend (in a system without onboard gfx) for oss drivers. That's definitely the most stupid thing you can spend your money for. If you buy something fast, then you PAY just for running oss drivers without proper power management.

[crazycheese]

That has nothing to do with games. Certainly you can only benchmark games that run with oss drivers, so the collection is very limited. I would NEVER buy a card which is not lowend (in a system without onboard gfx) for oss drivers. That's definitely the most stupid thing you can spend your money for. If you buy something fast, then you PAY just for running oss drivers without proper power management.

Pff, Im not a gamer. But I like OpenArena, UrbanTerror, OpenTransportTycoon, Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 - all native and I own 1-3 Splinter Cell, NOLF2, Stalker3, Painkiller+BOOH that lie dusty on shelf, cause I prefer the first of their replay value. The choice might be limited because of performance, but performance is very acceptable on FOSS drivers(OpenArena going fullHD@32bit@full anisotrophy@bloom ON isnt easy benchmark). You can search youtube for UT2004 running on FOSS drivers. Well I own HD4770 and I dont regret switching, it was worth my money! Btw the card idles at 20W(messed!)on FOSS drivers speaking of "power management". Its very probably there is 60 fps instead of 160 only because of it staying within economy powercycles. I hope AMD and Xorg push R700 powermgmnt code, but the card is worth using and buying!

Or is Debian suddenly for Nvidia now?

[rohcQaH]

kano, you're missing a use-case here:

- dual-booting to windows for games
- running oss drivers on linux for work and a bit of 3d-compositing

in that scenario, a high-end 4xxx is probably the best choice at the moment.


also, what crazycheese said.

[Kano]

That usage case is stupid without powermanagement. Did you see it mainline yet?

Btw. whats the powerconsumption with binary driver in your example?

[Chad Page]

Re 4770: True 'dat. I see newegg still has one for $105-15AR, which is quite a good value.

[jrch2k8]

That usage case is stupid without powermanagement. Did you see it mainline yet?

Btw. whats the powerconsumption with binary driver in your example?

well im not sure if you have tested the latest bits of the foss driver, but i can say for sure that with kernel 2.6.34/ all latest git code have reduced the power impact on my laptop.

my laptop is a turion x2/ radeon x1200

in winxp with the latest supported catalyst 75ish minutes of battery life
in kubuntu 10.04 latest foss driver and 2.6.34 kernel 58ish minuntes of battery life

i tested it, seen the time when i turned on and the time when the laptop go off, so ok is not exactly a bench but is good for me to notice an improvement.

beside the battery life i can say for sure that my laptop is way cooler, before the latest patch in 2.6.34 my legs ended burning with the heat, now is always wormish and not too much hotter than winxp.

so is not like you try to make it look, that the foss driver is a huge power beast these days, cuz it has certainly improved in both of my systems. ok is not perfect yet, but the current state is in a very acceptable state, lol most ppl can live with only 15m less in battery life.

i read too that 2.6.35 bring another set of changes to imporve further the power management in the foss driver.

now if you have an utterly hot and short life battery system using the foss driver with everything updated, should be interesting to make a post with some debug info cuz maybe your system is not accepting some of the changes for powermanagement.

if you have an evergreen card, well in that case maybe you are rigth cuz the support for evergreen is still far behind compared to previous generations and im not really sure that the dynpm code recognize the evergreen serie yet (would be worth to investigate though )