AMD/ATI lost another Linux customer

[Pulfer]

I agree with everything except the part about the 4850 being expensive.

I mean it's relatively expensive (compared to 4650 etc or some nVidia cards).

It makes sense to buy ~4850 if you
1. use Windows to play modern games
2. and Linux only to watch movies, browse Internet and do other things that don't require 3D support.

But if you don't play in Windows you don't need powerful card for (2) then.

And if you need 3D in Linux, you better avoid ATI for now.

[NeoBrain]

I can confirm both issues (4850, amd64).

I can confirm that S2RAM never worked for me with Compiz enabled, never since 8.42 (oh well, anything earlier couldn't even run Compiz, 8.41 doesn't count)

[cutterjohn]

Using nVidia is good idea. I recently replaced ATI 4850 card with nVidia 250 card and I was impressed with nVidia's proprietary driver quality. ATI's hopeless Cataclysm sucks in everything, ATI's promising open source ati/radeon driver is very good in 2D and video playback, but with nVidia you get all features (2D, 3D etc) at the same high level of quality.

Most likely I will buy ATI card in future, when open source driver gets full-feature support for modern cards. But for now buying expensive modern ATI card (like 4850) is a waste of money if you use Linux...

Should've gotten the GTX260-216 as the 250 is a re-badged 9800GTX+. The 260 eats 4850s for breakfast, and holds its own against 4870s. (Even the GTX260M is pretty good... but so is the lessermobile model GTS160M IIRC almost @ 260M performance. Well AMD had their window of opportunity, but it looks like it's passed them by again(K8, granted they had less time with their mobile GPUs but given that they had years of dominance with the K8 and couldn't manage to keep it up... but that's what happens when you fail at R&D, letting suits run an engineering firm...).)

[Pulfer]

Should've gotten the GTX260-216 as the 250 is a re-badged 9800GTX+.

I've been thinking about that but... Actually, GTX260-216 is too expensive for my needs. It costs ~230$ here while ASUS 1024Mb "ENGTS250 Dark Knight/HTDI" is ~170$. So I decided to buy 250 which is equal to 4850 in performance, I guess.

[naraki]

Do the HD2000+ only Catalyst drivers still suck?

[cutterjohn]

I've been thinking about that but... Actually, GTX260-216 is too expensive for my needs. It costs ~230$ here while ASUS 1024Mb "ENGTS250 Dark Knight/HTDI" is ~170$. So I decided to buy 250 which is equal to 4850 in performance, I guess.

Huh? A few weeks ago they were about $170 or so at newegg...

I can already see several right now, $150 after MIR... $180 before...

Must be MIR season on nVidia cards as it looks like ALL of them have them... even though the GT250 is slightly cheaper, ~$20 for decent ones, I'd personally still go for the 260-216...

[Pulfer]

Huh? A few weeks ago they were about $170 or so at newegg...

People who live in countries with such low hardware prices are lucky. :-)

[NeoBrain]

And if you need 3D in Linux, you better avoid ATI for now.

I can only speak for myself here ofc, but ATI's 3D support with fglrx has been working perfectly for me for some releases new (actually, I can't remember any issue with it apart from the famous memleak in 8.42).
The only problem was Wine, but even this work reliable for me now.

My other issues come down to the damn blur plugin in Compiz/KWin not working, starting a second X server hardlocking my system (xinit xterm -- :2), Wine taking 10 seconds to initialize since 9.7 and S2RAM/S2Disk not working reliably.

[Pulfer]

I can only speak for myself here ofc, but ATI's 3D support with fglrx has been working perfectly for me for some releases new (actually, I can't remember any issue with it apart from the famous memleak in 8.42).
The only problem was Wine, but even this work reliable for me now.

I wish I could say the same... But Catalyst never worked well for me. It was freezing my system here and there. The last time I installed 9-6, opened KDE 4.2.4 settings (wanted to check out if I could turn the compositing on with XRender) and got system freeze. After that I reverted back to open source ati/radeon. In general, I don't remember any Catalyst release that didn't give me hard locks. In one release you get freeze here, in another you get freeze there...

[cutterjohn]

Pulfer, I really don't thinkit hard locks the entire machine, but only X. Well, that's my suspicion at least since I still, ATM, don't have a second machine handy to attempt to ssh in and see whats going on(if I could).

Also, can't you find somewhere in Europe(outside of Russia) to maybe order your hardware from? Somewhere in Europe they must also have stores with decent prices even if they usually already tack on the 20% or VAT, which you should be able to get back anyways...