Re: [PLUG] The state of ATI vs. nVidia on Linux

[Roman Stanchak <rstanchak@gmail.com>]

As much as I'd like to recommend AMD, ATI graphics are a world of
pain. In mid Feb. I picked up an AMD 740G based motherboard with
integrated graphics - a summary of my experiences:

* Most of the live cds I tried gave me a blank or garbled display
(Hardy, Suse, Arch, Sabayon, Gentoo).
* Intrepid worked out of the box with the open-source radeon driver,
but no OpenGL, XVideo or RandR support.
* fglrx (the ATI binary driver) in the Intrepid repo had horrible 2D
performance (like, delays scrolling in an xterm)
* radeonhd driver (the alternative open-source driver) didn't recognize the 740G
* fglrx 9.3 (released in March) was finally OK

Things went downhill again when I upgraded to Jaunty yesterday:
* fglrx 9.3 doesn't support Jaunty's version of Xorg
* open-source radeon driver gives a garbled display
* fglrx 9.4 removed support for the 740G.
* The VESA driver worked up to 1280x1024, but not 1680x1050

Ugh. After spending half the day bungling through the radeonhd driver
source code, I managed to patch it sufficiently to get a usable
display.  On one hand, I'm really annoyed I had to resort to this, but
on the other, I'm pretty happy that this code was available and I now
have a working display.

My next graphics card/chipset will almost definitely be Nvidia or Intel.

--Roman
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug