I’ve read the HCL, but it’s not very detailed on the various cards, and I don’t know how reliable the information is.
I might end up buying a GeForce card because I’ve used Nvidia before and their drivers are decent, but I would of course prefer supporting a company which do not only release binaries. Are there any yet which meet my demands?
My requirements:
3D support
dual monitor support
price <140 €
PCI Express
It doesn’t have to be very high end, I simply want my desktop to be snappy with all eye candy enabled, I don’t play any games or stuff like that.
Do you know somewhere else where I can find general information? There are a multitude of cards out there to choose from, I prefer not having to go through them all and googling if that particular card is well supported…
From my experience, nvidia has stellar driver for their cards (although the most recent ones tends to lag behind a bit to get supported). ATI, as you can see from the various outcries in the Hardware area of this forum, has been patchy with the last few driver releases (and they end support for legacy card before R600).
On the open source front, both noveau and radeon driver has progressed a lot in 2009. 3D support is already there, but it’s still very new and experimental. Depends on which card you have it’ll either work smoothly or not at all. (I recently tried Fedora 12 with it’s experimental ATI 3D support using open source driver and it works very well on my laptop’s HD 3200 card).
So it really depends on what you want. If you’re not on the gaming side, I suggest you to pick a card that can last you through the years and gives you more options in term of driver choice. I’m pretty sure you can use google to find other users’ experience with the cards.
There really aren’t many players in the videocard market… and some things that are expected of a modern videocard are patented and can’t be opensourced.
I’d say go for NVIDIA you’ll support a company that puts effort into writing linux drivers, the drivers may not be opensource, but do they really need to be?
Creap wrote:
> I’ve read the HCL, but it’s not very detailed on the various cards, and
> I don’t know how reliable the information is.
>
> I might end up buying a GeForce card because I’ve used Nvidia before
> and their drivers are decent, but I would of course prefer supporting a
> company which do not only release binaries. Are there any yet which meet
> my demands?
>
> My requirements:
>
> - 3D support
> - dual monitor support
> - price <140 €
@Axeia: I doubt that patents are the problem to open source drivers. If manufacturors would be more open about their products, the problem would not exist IMHO.
I do agree with Axeia on NVIDIA. Yes, their drivers are closed source. But they do provide us with linux drivers, they do not fight a war against open source.
Thank you for your answers, but I think you underestimate the problem with binary drivers. Especially since I want my card to last and be usable for a long time, even after company X decides it’s not worth caring about.
For Linux, the best way of demonstrating user satisfaction objectively is with the kerneloops project, which tracks reported problems with various kernels … For instance looking at the recently released 2.6.25 kernel one can see that both the binary Nvidia driver and binary ATI firegl driver account for positions in the top 15 oopses. If one follows the history, one finds that the binary drivers are always significant contributors to this list, whereas open source drivers appear and disappear (corresponding to people actually seeing the bugs and fixing them).
I had the same requirements as you for a recently built system; sure, I’d rather support a company that has fully open drivers, but I think Nvidia deserves ALOT of credit for their support of the Linux community.
I ended up with a Geforce 210 based MSI card that is passively cooled, pcie, supports 3d and dual monitors, and provides a very fast desktop and, here in the States, I paid under us$50. Does hard video acceleration too, BTW.
I am running OS11.2-x86_64, Intel lynnfield, 4gb ram, etc. and have had no issues with the card or drivers; I would certainly buy the same card again if I were building a non-gaming box.
I’d go for nvidia cards. Even though NV offers only a closed source blob driver, compared to other drivers like nouveau/radeonhd/ati prop driver/etc, it is the best out there and offers not only very good performance but also is argubly much more stable than the others…