[Gloucs] Video card on a new computer

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sun, May 08, 2011 at 12:04:57AM +0100, Anthony Edward Cooper wrote:
> NVidia is your best bet as NVidia support Linux and do their own
> drivers. Intel seem to be well supported by the stock Intel device
> drivers that come with Linux (or at least for the chip sets that I
> have used it on). I would not touch ATI though. Linux support for
> quite a few ATI cards is pretty bad and I think ATI don't support
> Linux any more.
> 
> I'd always go for NVidia and their drivers. Ubuntu and Debian have
> their drivers in assorted repos.
> 
> Tony.
> John Kilgour wrote:
> >I may soon have to replace my 2003 PC with an Athlon XP processor
> >and Intel graphics. Possible new machines (low cost) have Intel,
> >Nvidia or ATI radeon graphics. Please can any of you indicate
> >which of these are most Linux friendly?
> >Thanks in advance
> >John Kilgour
> >
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Two men, two different opinions.

Intel appear not to do separate chipsets for graphics cards any more - so no add in cards.

For netbooks and laptops, there are a couple of low end Intel graphics chipsets with 
nasty features / closed binary bits which cause problems (Google Poulsbo video driver)
and almost all Intel chipsets steal memory from the system board.

Nvidia - nice, but proprietary driver _WILL_ involve kernel rebuilds with every release,
may not be well supported by distributions and may suddenly be dropped by Nvidia themselves.
The ION chipsets on some mini-ITX boards work quite well, however, if you don't need heavyweight 3D.

There is a fully free 2D/3D driver for some Nvidia cards coming along nicely - nouveau - but it 
almost certainly won't support latest cards well.

ATI - now that they're owned by AMD - are coming along quite nicely. Radeon drivers 
work fairly well for all but the latest gamers cards. 

Am very tempted by the latest mini-ITX boards with the E350 chipset from AMD - dual core, 64 bit and
virtualisation capable, will take up to 8GB of memory and the graphics chipset doesn't suck - all
for about 30W of power.

As ever, it depends what you want to do and how you want to do it. If your PC's greatest demand for
full 3D is the odd screensaver it will be very different from wanting to do full rendering. Note: Ubuntu's Unity
interface is quite demanding on the video card because it presumes 3D rendering, 256 / 512M of memory on card
as far as I can see. 

At the moment (11.04) Ubuntu will revert to plain GNOME if the machine won't do Unity (like my netbook / any machine
under KVM) but Ubuntu are planning that Unity will be the only desktop interface by the next release (11.10).

Non-Intel architecture ARM boards are almost all proprietary - Nvidia's Tegra chipset is popular - and no-one is 
willing to help ports at the moment with graphics details :(


All the best,

Andy