ATI/NVidia driver status?

May 01st, 2008 - 09:33 am ET by Tom Forsmo | Report spam

Hi

What is the current status of drivers for linux by ATI or NVidia?
I know they both provide proprietary drivers, but I am unsure how well
they work. The same goes for the open source driver, lacking information
and all that...

I am looking to buy a new graphics card for my Debian Opteron
workstation and my choices have come down to the following:

- Nvidia 8800 GTX
(the 9800 series is not supported by the proprietary drivers yet)
- ATI HD 3900

I am planning on running it with 1920x1200 resolution with KDE, emacs,
Konsole, web etc, no gaming or photo editing or stuff like that. (Gaming
will of course have to be done in Windows or Wii (or soon maybe; PS3))

Does the current drivers work for that? or will there be minor/major
problems?
Are the open source driver good/fast enough or must I use the
proprietary one?

regards

Tom

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#1 Chris Cox

May 06th, 2008 - 07:44 pm ET | Report spam

Darren Salt wrote:

I demand that Chris Cox may or may not have trolled...

Mark Hobley wrote:

In comp.os.linux.hardware Chris Cox wrote:

Ok... but having owned ATI and Nvidia cards throughout the years,
ATI always gives me the most headaches...

I only use ATI cards here, and have had no problems with the open source
drivers.

The open source drivers only support a limited subset of cards and even
then, no accelerated 3d on most (and 3d only very recently anyhow).

That would be "r5xx and r6xx cards, ignoring the older ones", right?

Are you talking about the very recent advancement in having some
3d support? If so, I can't remember which cards were supported... but
still, it's progress. And yes, I know, the support is very limited
at least today (that is limited 3d).

I'm hoping we'll see the first viable FOSS set of drivers for
accelerated 3d (that is, something that runs at least games made
5 years ago reasonably well). But today... if you want that...
Nvidia works the best.

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ATI/NVidia driver status?

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