[kde-linux] To NV or not to NV?

[Duncan]

David Baron posted on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:20:49 +0300 as excerpted:

> That is a question: Use an old matrox g200 dinosaur with marginal DRI
> capabilies or an old Nvidia  TNT marsupial using the nv driver (no DRI)
> since the nvidia-legacy DRI stuff has been broken for a long time now.

You will of course get different views, but my viewpoint is freedomware 
loving enough that I'm unlikely to ever purchase an nVidia again, until 
they start cooperating a bit better than they are now, anyway.  Even 
after the reverse engineered freedomware nouveau driver gets upto speed, 
I'm unlikely to buy nVidia, because they weren't cooperating in the 
process.

As it happens, I'm looking at video cards ATM, and the AMD/ATI Radeon 
series looks to be the best freedomware alternative ATM. Which card is 
your best choice depends on a couple factors.  If you're running cards as 
old as you mention and you're upgrading them in existing hardware, you're 
probably running AGP (if not PCI), and the r500 based cards are probably 
your best bet.  For newer PCI-E, the r500 based cards have the best 
current support, but the r600 and r700 based driver development is coming 
on strong, and you'll likely have reasonably good support sometime next 
year in the distributions, possibly late this year or early next, from 
xorg itself.

I'm in the AGP camp myself, and am looking at the r500 cards.  The top of 
the line there is still quite pricey for its age, the x1950 at a going 
price of $150 (USD) or so.  In part, it's priced as it is due to the 
extra bridge hardware they have on the AGP boards, since it's native PCI-
E based.

If you're looking at a whole new system or at least a new mobo, or happen 
to have PCI-E already, AND are looking for future best functionality, but 
are willing to settle for limited or no OpenGL (or unstable live git 
sources) for the moment, low-end hdXXXX cards are cheap, and high end 
hdXXXX cards should provide very good performance, once the actively-in-
development drivers mature and settle down, probably some time next year, 
as I said.

That said, if you're a gamer you likely run proprietary games already, 
and probably don't see a problem, other than the hassle, with running 
proprietary nvidia drivers.  For that class of user, nVidia's still the 
way to go, and they /do/ tend to provide very good Linux support for 
their proprietary driver, within limits on length of time supported and 
time to support new xorgs and new kernels.  If those limits are as low 
priority, and raw performance as high priority, as they are for the 
typical gamer, nVidia at multiple hundred dollars per high-end card and 
possibly multiple cards, is still the way to go.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman