NVidia - Sweet and simple..

English Soapbox
#1

After months, actually no, over a year of frustration with ATI’s driver support, painful 3d and fglrx (mal)functioning, I finally ripped out my HD4XXX card this evening and replaced it with an old dusty Asus GeForce 6800. Five minutes after rebuilding the rig, I had 3d working, and unlike ATI, fully functional.

While I can commend ATI for their work in open-sourcing their drivers, - there’s a point at which no amount of goodwill can compensate for the frustration of an end-user who has two HD series cards, none of which have decent (i.e. stable, consistent and reliable) 3d support in either proprietary or open drivers.

So, with an archaic NVidia card now doing what two brand new cards couldn’t even come close to, I’m starting to wonder whether ATI realise or even care about the quality of their closed-source driver, or the linux market. Or whether they realise that the people in this market are actually the people who will in many cases recommend cards to those who are Windows users, I’d be inclined to think they haven’t searched that deeply in that realm of cause and effect…

Either way, - it’s a world of difference having decent, responsive and stable display functionality again. I don’t think I’ll miss booting up to a black screen that much…

#2

Hi
With the right models you can also take advantage of VDPAU and CUDA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.42-0.1-default
up 6 days 19:39, 4 users, load average: 0.28, 0.32, 0.39
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

#3

Thanks for the heads-up Malcolm, while the 6800 can’t manage either, atleast I have a responsive & functional screen to look at now. It’s good to know what NVidia have up their sleeve however. Something tells me it’ll be a lot less painful to stick with them in future. Each to their own I guess.

#4

Welcome to the party! :slight_smile:

#5

It’s so easy, you can’t understand how on earth folk seem to get in to such a mess with itlol!

#6

> It’s so easy, you can’t understand how on earth folk seem to get in to
> such a mess with itlol!

It’s easy to understand, and I appreciate their quandry since replacing a
video card can be an unwanted expense. However, the payoff on the change is
nearly instant.

#7

Now you are just being pedantic - You totally miss the point of the hyperbole, which was meant to emphasise the ease with which such practices can be accomplished these days in Linux.

Peace:)

#8

> Now you are just being pedantic

Not at all, however if I were to be, I would continue on a discourse
about my experiences with ATI and blown CRT’s. As for missing the hyperbole,
I freely admit my guilt. There are many different senses of humor and people
miss mine as much as I miss theirs. :slight_smile:

#9

:shake:
./C

#10

That is such a good point and it is often overlooked. The manufacturers all state that the Linux market is too small to matter. How easily they ignore us. They forget that many of us Linux geeks, also admin large Windows networks, and when our users come to us for advice on what to buy, we do consider their actions on what hardware we recommend.

Now, I’m not saying nVidia is perfect, because we all know that they still have quite a ways to go too, but they have made strides to accommodate us. ATI just gave us some lip service a few years ago, but never delivered on it.

I refuse to tell my fellow employees to buy anything with ATI video. I used to recommend AMD processors, but now that most all sytems with AMD processors come with ATI video, I have to tell users to stick with Intel and nVidia.

I am just one Linux user, but last November and December, I guess I helped close to 25 people shop for new laptops for their children. Single moms, and such. They know absolutely nothing about PCs and bought just what I told them they needed. ATI and other manufacturers need to rethink their idea of how insignificant we are. :wink:

Edit: I also find nVidia cards a lot easier to deal with in Windows than ATI cards.

#11

Once you know where to go…NVIDIA made some jokes at us too. The mobile series for example, the GM1xx, they needed beta drivers that were nowhere to be found on the NVIDIA site. They were here though:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/

But, as said, once you know where to go…and these days you just install, init 5 and off you go.

Mind, on kernel 2.6.33 you have to blacklist nouveau to get the driver installed.

#12

I have an NVIDIA card but I refuse to join in the general praise until NVIDIA actually support something as basic to X as RandR 1.2. Don’t know if ATI do. RandR 1.2 is a test of Linux support rather than porting the latest games frippery to Linux, and one that NVIDIA continue to fail miserably.

#13

I have ATI HD 4770 and got it to work in about 10 minutes. I have had no problems with it in Ubuntu as well.

I do have an old NVIDIA 7200 GS which is pure ****, and I would never exchange it.

When it comes to Linux and ATI/NVIDIA, it really doesn’ tmake a difference for me as the 3D acceleration will always have something tricky about it. Though Ubuntu handles the proprietary drivers much easier than OpenSuSE, I had no trouble getting my ATI HD 4700 running.

P.S. Then again, arguments on ATI/NVIDIA, Intel/AMD, Mac/PC, etc. will never cease. :wink:

#14

I posted this in another thread (on 23-Feb-10), and I think it still a valid personal comment in the ATI vs nVidia graphic card debate. Note that I am a nVidia fan, but that for my recently purchased laptop (Dell Studio 1537 - purchased 15 months ago) I deliberately purchased ATI hardware (because of concerns wrt nVidia graphic card quality) …

I think the main reason many Linux users are unhappy with ATI is their graphic drivers are either typically lagging nVidia drivers when a new Linux release comes out, or in some cases ATI drivers are simply bad (note I say some, but NOT all cases).

Case in point … it was only last week that the ATI drivers were formally updated for openSUSE-11.2 … and I am now finally going to give serious consideration to updating our family laptop from openSUSE-11.1 to 11.2. This is about 4 months after 11.2 was released, and many many more months after the 11.2 milestone cycle was in process. Many Linux users (and indeed many openSUSE users) find that “lag” from when a change is made to Linux (where it be a new kernel, new xorg, or new distribution version), to when a new ATI driver comes out, to be upsetting and for them unacceptable.

Somehow, nVidia appear to be able to put their drivers out quicker.

Another nice thing about nVidia, is they have implemented VDPAU for Linux, which is the equivalent of pure video in MS-Windows. This gives some old hardware some great capabilities with nVidia graphics (in terms of playing back High Definition Videos).

ATI have not supported an AVIVO equivalent for Linux (they have provided no documentation so that even if AVIVO is in the Linux driver (and I am not certain it is) it still can not be used). In fact, speaking of older hardware and graphic manufacturer support, ATI have dropped support for older hardware that they call “legacy hardware”. I think it fair to say that vVidia are still doing a substantially better job of supporting such “legacy hardware” than ATI. So if one is going to purchase new graphic hardware, it sends a message that one will get better longer term support from nVidia (for drivers) than one will get from ATI. ATI no longer support moderately older hardware.

Edit: … although I note ATI once they do support a distribution, do have a reasonable driver in other areas, such as “xrandr” support, where I have read nVidia are lagging.

Still, the poor quality of nVidia hardware, with the hardware failures that have “bitten” a number of people that I know, is not something to be underestimated, nor under stated, … nVidia have had SERIOUS quality problems. I know people who have been bitten and are very upset with nVidia because of the very poor quality of some of their graphic card products.

… and hence from my perspective, there are PROS and CONS on both sides of the ATI vs nVidia question, and I think users on both sides have some very good points.