[Cialug] video cards, was [ot] laptop

[D. Joe Anderson]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:51:07AM -0500, Major Stubble wrote:

> I have yet to be impressed by the RELIABILITY of any ATI card
> in the last five years.  Sure they may out-perform nVidia at
> times, but every nVidia-based card I've purchased is still
> kicking (makes it really hard to justify upgrades, though).

Hmm.  This one goes like the hard drive discussion, it seems.  

I've got a dozen nVidia TNT2 cards at work we purchased in '99
or so, and about a third of them have gone bad, several *just*
after the system-integrator's warranty ran out.  Which didn't
bother me a lot--it's like you say, an excuse to upgrade!

At home for personal use, I bought an ATI card, wanted DRI so I
could play Q3A and bzflag and couldn't get it to work with the
ATI at the time, so I bought an nVidia card (see comments
below).  It went bad, I put the ATI card back in, and it's
continued to work just swell.  I suppose one of these days I'll
see if I can get the TV functions of it to work.

> Also, (and I may get many who disagree with this) I like
> that nVidia's driver solution for Linux ACTUALLY WOR[K]S.

I don't know that much of the flak one reads about nVidia is
directly about whether it works.  I've often gotten it to work
fine.

Rather, the problem is two-fold:  1) it's not that it doesn't
work, it's that it isn't free, which is a stopping point right
there for some people and 2) some of those people are kernel
developers, and it's not so much an ideological problem as a
practical legal problem, which leads to the distribution-related
hassles that we all have to suffer when trying to get it to
work.

It has gotten easier, but there will always be an irreducible
fiddle-factor with running nVidia stuff so long as nVidia's DRI
requires running their proprietary binary blobs.  As I found
with my ATI card, it didn't work well with DRI when new, but
eventually support for it made its way into mainstream releases
of Xwhatever, so that now it Just Works.

It's not really a very good situation either way, though.

-- 
D. Joe Anderson         http://www.etrumeus.com/~deejoe
"DRM [...] is to copyright law as a machine gun on                                          
a motion detector is to real estate law"  -- Don Marti