[Gloucs] Video card on a new computer

[Anthony Edward Cooper]

Oh just remembered - Don't go for the Intel/NVidia combos yet (uses 
Intel for low power and then switches to NVidia for sexy high powered 
graphics - you can get it to work but by disabling the NVidia side in 
the BIOS). :-(.
Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> 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
>
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