--- Jon Pruente [email protected] wrote:
On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 5:19 AM, feba thatl [email protected] wrote:
ATI might work for you; when I tried to use it I got nothing but problems, both on Windows and Linux. The same goes for everyone else I've ever talked to about graphics cards on linux. Nvidia, however, worked out of the box. I'm not going to argue that it's better to be open source when possible; obviously that's the main reason most of us are here; but neither of those companies are very good options yet.
Recent personal experience (Dec/Jan): ATI not so fun, nVidia just worked. I had purchased an ATI HD2400 256MB AGP card for myself, and it just wouldn't work in Linux with the ATI Catalyst drivers. It also had a very hard time getting up in Windows (I went so far as to install a 30-day trial of Vista, just to see if it was the hardware failing after trying for so long in Linux). I returned the card to MicroCenter and purchased a 7600GS 256MB AGP card, which I dropped in and Ubuntu found the binary drivers for and just started working.
I think I have the same card. Apparently the card is so fast in 2D that I just don't care about the lack of "3D acceleration" when I'm running "TESIV:Oblivion" under Transgaming's Cedega.
It's nice that ATI is going Open, but from what I read about my problem it was likely to be an issue with the AGP controller chip on the card to translate the PCIe native chip to my old system.
People keep going on about "3D acceleration" in ATi cards, but I've never gotten an ATi card to run in Linux on anything other than the VESA driver (if that), so I don't think I've *ever* seen how ATi "gives 3D acceleration" to Linux graphics. nVidia cards in Linux are fast, even when the situation is a 3D game, so if I'm not getting 3D acceleration then I salute nVidia for making 3D acceleration not matter in the slightest to the pleasure of the graphical experience.
I don't know about "illegal", but generally it seems that when something is illegal in the computer world, the *intent* is weighed just as much as the *act*. Cisco is just as much of a monopoly in *act* as Microsoft, but as they don't behave (much) like a monopoly in *intent*, no one talks about antitrust lawsuits around Cisco. nVidia doesn't seem to be doing anything other than binary drivers for its video cards, so it would appear that whatever the "letter of the law" illegality of nVidia drivers, the spirit of the law isn't being violated.
As for "obsolete cards lack drivers", this is true of any video card for which the community lacks interest in as well, source code or no source code. The Ubuntu free "nv" driver has worked fine for all the older nVidia cards I've had lying around. I suspect that "obsolete" nVidia cards are largely a non-issue. By the time nVidia decides not to make a driver for a particular card, that card will be like an ISA video card today: no one uses it anymore.
nVidia just works. There's an affordable nVidia card in every store, and dropping it into an Ubuntu system means you know it will work. You can't say that about ATi.
This somewhat goes back to my point that most of the new Ubuntu/Kubuntu users are people who don't change their desktops: insist that they have to jump through hoops and attend computer night school just to get their ATi video card installed, and they'll go back to Windows. Hand them a "drop-in" video solution from nVidia, and Linux use will spread, possibly even to the point of gaining the kind of market share that can force open source drivers from nVidia.
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