[Gllug] Graphics card advice

[Huw Lynes]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 12:59 +0800, Richard Cohen wrote:
> Yeah, I know it's a reasonably FAQ, but it's also one for which the
> answer changes.

> free driver seemed more stable and featureful, if slightly slower -
> but I consider good xv or xrender support to be worth a few fps off in
> 3d games, for example.

Most of the lower end nVidia cards are well supported by the open-source
nv driver. My main machine at home is an Athlon64 with an FX5200
(because the card is fanless it's quite quiet) used mainly for coding
but also for watching DVDs on a 19" TFT. I haven't missed the extra
speed of the proprietary driver.  

> The first question is if PCIe is supported well enough on Linux to be
> planning to use it in a new machine.  There does seem to be some
> support, and it seems to be reasonably similar to PCI, so I don't
> think it's much of a problem, but obviously the whole graphical stack
> (i.e. kernel and X, both bus and device drivers) needs support...

Funny you should mention PCIe. We've just recently started rolling out
PCIe based workstations. This on something almost but not entirely
unlike Red Hat Enterprise 4. We are not having any problems with them
thus far. Obviously for these boxes we use nVidia workstation cards and
nVidia's own drivers because OpenGL performance is the critical factor.
If you decide to hold your nose and use non-free drivers the nVidia
drivers are much less hassle than the ATI ones.


-- 
| Huw Lynes               | The Moving Picture Company  |
| System Administrator    | 127 Wardour Street          |
|.........................| London, W1F 0NL             |

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