Radeon 8500/GeForce3 Ti500 comparison

RainDog writes: "The Tech Report has put together a pretty detailed comparison of ATI's Radeon 8500 and NVIDIA's GeForce3 Titanium 500 graphics parts. Despite being incredibly thorough, the review is also a pretty entertaining read. Definitely the best comparison of these cards I've seen to date."

Comments

Open Drivers

[riggwelter]

For any Linux users looking at these cards, remember you can get 3D hardware acceleration on the Radeon with the Open Source drivers, you need to download the closed drivers for the NVidia card...

Re:Open Drivers

[aussersterne]

You're wrong about this.

a) There is an open-source component which hooks the driver core into your kernel. As long as you have XFree86 4, you'll should be able to use the latest NVidia driver by issuing "make install" in the source directory. I have not had any problems with NVidia drivers yet, on any version of the kernel, and I'm now in the 2.5.x-prex series.

b) Which brings me to support of older cards... You haven't bothered to look at the list of hardware supported by the NVidia driver, have you? You might be surprised... driver support goes all the way back to the NVidia RivaTNT... which predates Linux DRI 3D support!

This anti-NVidia-Linux stuff is just a lot of GPL-fanatic FUD.

I've personally owned and tried a Voodoo5 5500, a Radeon (original) and my current hardware, a Geforce2Pro, under Linux. There is no comparison in driver support/how well the cards work... The NVidia card "just works" with Linux and is as fast or faster than under Windows. By comparison, the others feel half-supported by Linux at best.

Re:Biased comparison

[cs668]

I have to say that I have had really good luck with the last 3 realeases of the nvidia drivers for Linux - X.

I would prefer they were open sourced. But, I am not going to slam drivers that have worked well for me just because they are not.

What's nice about these cards

[wiredog]

All sorts of high-end 3-d capability in these cards means that the very good 2-d capability (which used to only be in high-end cards) is much less expensive. A card that's Good Enough(TM) for non-gamers (like me) is now incredibly inexpensive. One more step in the commoditization of the PC.

Why do I care? Well, my father (age 72) is looking for a new PC and has budgeted $2,000 for it. He uses it for editing (of Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing), web surfing, Quicken, and e-mail. He needs the best LCD monitor/card combo because his eyes are 72 years old, but any CPU that's on the market will do. Plus 256 Mb ram, any current hard drive capacity, and cd-rw.

Remember when you couldn't get much more than the basics for 2 grand? I like Moore's Law.

Re:Biased comparison

[aussersterne]

You got it wrong. I've owned both. Truth:

Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, incomplete (no HW T&L), slower than Windows drivers, difficult to compile, unstable (prone to X hangs).

Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Open-source kernel module, binary core identical to Windows drivers (Detonator UDM), complete hardware support (incl. HW T&L and FSAA), as fast as Windows drivers, available as RPM download, complete OpenGL support, and I have never once had an X hang.

I sold my Radeon because I just couldn't get it to work right with Linux even after months of trying. I bought a GeForce2 Pro card for cheap, downloaded the NVidia drivers, and have been sailing ever since without problems or crashes.

GPL fanatic FUDder, you are.