On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:01:45 +0000
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As for 3D and closed source drivers... If you buy a nVidia card, you
can use
their closed source drivers, and they basically Just Work. If you buy an ATI
card, you can use... oops, sorry... you *cannot* use their closed source
drivers, because they do not support your version of X. Or you can opt for
open source radeon driver...
Which works perfectly fine, 2D and 3D wise, with the occasional bug, on my:
* RV200 (Radeon 7500)
* R200 (FireGL 8800)
* RV350 (Radeon 9550)
* RV370 (FireGL V3100)
* RV410 (Radeon X700 Pro)
and I should say the few bugs I've encountered were all fixed within a few
days of my reporting them. I use the V3100 at work (my workstation there
always runs the latest Fedora) to light up a 2x1600x1200 setup and I
obviously need it working reliably.
Of course, I use neither IGPs nor the latest cards.
oops, sorry... you *cannot* opt for radeon(hd)
driver because ATI did *not* disclose the specs for their HD family of cards.
They did.
They also pay people (Alex Deucher for instance) to develop a free driver.
See:
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=43
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=47
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=48
So we get specifications and a free driver.
<sarcasm>
And as you know, ATI is very open-source-friendly, unlike those nVidia guys...
</sarcasm>
ATI provides specs and code hand in hand with the Xorg devs.
NVIDIA provides a binary blob.
Who's most opensource friendly?
François