Tom's Hardware Reviews ATI and Nvidia on Linux

Beuno writes "I stumbled upon a GeForce vs Radeon review on Tom's Hardware, which seems normal enough. The big surprise is that it was actually a comparison of those two video cards on Linux (Fedora Core 5). The review isn't as thorough as I would like, but it does review all aspects ranging from tools available, complexity of getting them to work and benchmarks on performance. To me, this is a clear signs of Linux finally making a long expected breakthrough into common desktops."

Comments

Re:Compatibility...

[Billy the Impaler]

WINE and Cedega are not emulators, rather, they implement a compatibility layer. Cedega is a proprietary fork of WINE that has more advanced DirectX implementation.

Re:let them do a Notebook comparison and see ATI f

[killpog]

Yup, I agree. No comparison yet. I advise all my clients not to buy ATI. They will not respond to requests for support, and refuse to acknowlege any bugs. They disgust me.

ATI, Linux, and Apple

[miyako]

I've always used nVidia cards, which have always worked well for me under Linux. I've never tried getting an ATI card to work because I've never heard anything other than it was sheer agony to use an ATI card under Linux.
In general, this is fine. If a hardware vendor doesn't support my OS, then I will buy from a vendor who does. In this case, nVidia hovers between "almost as good as" and "slightly better than" ATI, depending on who has most recently released a new video card, so it's not a big compromise.
I do find ATIs lack of Linux support to be disappointing now however, because those of us interested on running Linux on an intel mac are stuck with a choice between ATI and an embedded crappy video card.
Incidentally, has anyone had any luck getting Linux to dual boot with OS X on one of the newer iMacs? I'm interested in getting one, but until Autodesk offers an Intel Mac version of Maya I'm stuck on Linux (and actually, even if there were an Intel Mac version, I'm not sure I want to pay the fee to transfer my license from Linux to Mac) so I can't justify getting a new machine unless it can run Linux well with good 3D support.

Re:ATI, Linux, and Apple

[matrixhax0r]

There's a new opensource driver for ATI cards. As you may already know, ATI released code and documentation for their old r200 and r100 based cards. Then the opensource community used that information to write opensource drivers which are now found in X11-DRM and Mesa.

However, for r300 and up, ATI wanted to force users to use their proprietary drivers which have really sucked so far. Never fear! There's the r300 project currently in development that aims to add support for these more modern cards. What started as an invididual project (http://r300.sourceforge.net/R300.php), is now fully integrate into the the offical DRM and Mesa development trees.

Although the r300 driver is not in the offical DRM nor Mesa releases yet, the are in the CVS tree.
DRM - cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/dri checkout drm
Mesa - cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/mesa checkout Mesa
There are quite a few guides on compiling and using these sources. I recomend checking the Gentoo Forums. They support EXA and Xorg 7.1 (unlike current ATI / nVidia drivers IIRC). In fact I'm using them as I'm typing this.

Performance is not nearly the speed of the binary drivers. However, I can still play UT2K4/Doom 3, so it's good enough. It looks very promising and is likely to get must faster in the future. It seems very stable and I haven't had a video driver crash since I started using them (around Xorg 7.01 release).

hm

[joe 155]

From TFA: "Acquiring Nvidia drivers seldom entails more than consulting a package repository for your Linux distribution of choice, and instructing local package management facilities to fetch, build, and install all required files and dependencies."

Well, support for Nvidia isn't supported on FC5 because it is non-free, so you won't find it in the standard repositories using yum... if you add livna you can do "yum install kmod-nvidia -y" which will handle it all... but it is important not to use the Nvidia ones because they overwrite sections of your X and can cause problems, especially if you change you card later. More info can be found here; http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installati on_notes.html#nVidia... just wanted to get the message out there to protect the penguins

But other sites have been doing this for a while

[loftwyr]

You can always get good info on hardware under linux on Phoronix. They've got lots of experience with linux builds and games and wine to give good information.

NVidia owners - Please help out Nouveaux project!

[Hobart]

This seems like a good on-topic thread in which to mention the freedesktop.org (X.org folks) effort to write a 100% open source 3D driver for the NVidia cards -- nouveau

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

If you're an owner of an nVidia card, please do all you can to help contribute! They appear to be suprisingly far along.

--
Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up!

Re:let them do a Notebook comparison and see ATI f

[laffer1]

There are other reasons to buy nVidia. They actually support OTHER open source operating systems. (FreeBSD, Solaris) I can play some games under FreeBSD 6 like Enemy Territory quite nicely using the nvidia binary drivers. The binary drivers got me to buy my first nVidia card ever. I'm rather impressed with it considering its not even one of their more recent cards (only fx5200). xorg support sucks above 9200 chipsets as their is no 3d acceleration. I only wish nvidia made their own video cards like ati does. I've had bad luck with some oem cards. (one nvidia and several ati)