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Re: [PLUG] OT: Video Card Choice
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On Sunday 09 June 2002 14H:28, you wrote:
> It doesn't really matter to me, but I am confused here, which drivers
> are of poor quality. I didn't do anything special to get my radeon
> cards working (I went through two of them in the past few months,
Check out anandtech.com for some good writeups (over the past 6 months or so)
on the state of the latest Radeon ATI drivers. It's not that they are that
difficult to configure, but that the performance has been abusrdly quirky,
depending on the type of applications or games you are running (newer cards
initially performing worse than the previous model in some extreme
situations). This was particularly bad for ATI when the Radeon architecture
was first released. nVidia's drivers out of the gate are almost always of a
much higher quality in terms of performance and feature support.
Having said all of that, at least ATI drivers under Linux are free, as in not
closed-source and proprietary. The source component of the nVidia drivers is
a kernel-module stub. The bulk of the source for nVidia Linux drivers is not
distributable.
I also prefer ATI when the quality of the hardware video signal (particularly
when using the s-video output) is important. With nVidia, it's highly
variable depending on which vender's nVidia board you get (Leadtek, Gainward,
etc.) and which components they opt for (the cheaper boards usually use
cheaper DAC components, etc.).
Recommendations:
nVidia for hardcore gamers (and I'd concur with the previous recommendation
to stay away from GeForce 4 MX), especially if you don't care about getting
all of the source code for your video drivers under Linux, etc. Currently,
these drivers are fast and offer extensive support for hardware acceleration
and numerous features, such as TwinView.
ATI for the purest video signal quality or if it's essential that you get all
of the source code for your video drivers under Linux, etc.
For me:
Unfortunately, I'm often somewhere in the middle. And, I haven't seen many
writeups comparing the video quality of the latest crop of nVidia Ti 4600
boards.
Just my $.02,
- -Jason Nocks
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