[Cialug] nvidia/ati

[Brandon Griffis]

My experience has been that ATI and nVidia have the same problems when it
comes to Linux.  If you buy a newish card you're going to have to use their
propritary drivers.  And when it comes to the propritary linux drivers
nVidia wins hands down every time.  But as you said you're looking to use
the built in open source drivers that come with Xorg.  For that you're
probably going to have to find an older ATI card.  I have heard there are
some nVidia cards out there that support 3d with the open source drivers,
but I've not seen them personally (google might be helpful here).  I can
tell you a Voodoo 3000 AGP will work, but it's an EXTREEMLY old card.
Arguably there are more older ATI cards that work with the OS drivers
because there was an "accidental" release of spec info on ATIs part a couple
years ago that covered quite a few of their cards.  This royally pissed off
a lot of people at ATI and people that contracted with ATI in developing the
technology (or so the story goes).  There is also talk that nVidia might be
open sourcing some of their older cards drivers soon.  I'm hopefull that
goes through.

Your best bet is to do a web search for known cards that work well in
Linux.  It will probably be ATI but you might find some nVidia that work.
In a quick search I found these:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_ATi_Open-Source_Drivers
http://www.j5live.com/?p=194

Gentoo often has a lot of great documentation, no matter what distro you're
running.  From their info it looks like you'd want to get a radeon card
between 7000 and 9250
Buy hardware that you know has been tested and works well with the OS
drivers.

Apparently the ATI cards that work with the open source driver are all R100
or R200 series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200

I'd say pick one from the R200 list and you should be fine.  Do a search for
configuring the card you choose to make sure it works well with the OS
drivers.

Good luck, hope this helps

-Gamble

On 12/8/06, Dave J. Hala Jr. <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:
>
> I ended up buying a diamond stealth s120 card from Staples that uses the
> Radeon 9550 chipset. I downloaded the ati proprietary driver and
> installed it. Redhat-config-xfree86, doesn't report the memory correctly
> for the vid card -even when using the ATI driver (fglrx), but it appears
> to be operating correctly. Secondly, in XF86Config, I added "1680x1050"
> to the modes line.
>
> It looks great and works great.
>
>
> On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 10:23, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 10:12 -0600, Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:
> > > I'm doing a flat panel and video card upgrade on my RHEL 3.x WS
> > > computer.
> > >
> > > I'm currently running a gforce mx4 video card using the nvidia driver
> > > with KDE. Its really kind of a *pita* due to the fact whenever you do
> a
> > > kernel update you need to do a driver update.
> > >
> > > I'm wondering if I switch to an ATI card can I still get decent X
> > > performance using an ATI driver that doesn't have the same pitfalls as
> > > the Nvidia drivers? If I buy a new card it will be something common
> and
> > > costing less than $100.00
> >
> > I have a ATI Radeon Mobility X600 in my laptop running FC6 with X.org
> > 7.1.1 and the stock ATI driver.  I get 50-60 FPS with PPRacer in 800x600
> > mode  and around 1900 FPS in glxgears.
> >
> > From what I've heard, unless you have the latest and greatest ATI card
> > or a really old one you can get decent performance out of them with the
> > drivers in recent versions of X.org.  There is also some work going on
> > to develop an open-source 3D driver for nVidia cards, but those aren't
> > quite ready yet.
> >
> > Jeff
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ______________________________________________________________________
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> --
>
> Open Source Information Systems, Inc. (OSIS)
> Dave J. Hala Jr., President <dave at osis.us>
> 641.485.1606 www.osis.us
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