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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."
Maybe this trend will have all game manufacturers making their games Linux compatible too? (As opposed to having to run them through emulators like Wine and Cedega)...
I know I'd move properly from XP if this were the case, and I suspect a lot of gamers feel the same way - there are a large portion that only use XP because getting the games to run under Linux is such a hassle.
We can but hope...
No thanks... I'll wait for the 300 page Toms Hardware revi-oh. I see.
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
This is all very well but Linux's big breakthrough on the desktop won't come until we can play Duke Nukem Forever on Linux.
To me, this is a clear signs of Linux finally making a long expected breakthrough into common desktops.
Yes, how can anyone doubt that 2007 will be the year of linux on the desktop?
Generally performance running games on Linux has been a mixed bag (on the same hardware).
NWN, WoW and UT have all been slightly faster than the Windows version, and crashes have been less of a problem (ctrl-alt-f1, kill task, no need to reboot - which _is_ required for some reason under Windows as games seem to offer best performance off a fresh reboot... resource recovery problems in the DirectX subsystem maybe?)
On the other hand EVE runs slower, with more graphical artifacts. Yes I'm aware that this is because it doesn't play that nicely with WINE and the fact that it runs in a playable fashion is a small miracle. It is still the case that if you want the best performance then you have to play it on Windows, for now.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
...on their face. Most laptops with ATI Mobility Express chipsets can't use the onboard video memory. ATI broke this a year ago and has not fixed it.
So don't trust ATI for Linux capabilities on notebooks.
Maybe Toms Hardware can do a notebook comparison since they've already done the desktop. I'm pretty sure that would expose this failure to far more than the few who already are aware of this. And just maybe, it'll get ATI to fix this.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
They even mentioned DRI.
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.
The print version and because that didn't work for me, the same via coral cache
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.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
You're a pedantic idiot who read wrong. Oh the irony.
The original parent was RIGHT. You CAN play Quake 3 using only free software, just like >>I, using WINE, can use something such as Visio 'using only free software'.
Wanker,
Because hundreds of Desktop apps require 3D accelerated drivers.
... err ... erm ... you know.
Like erm
Oh, 3D rendering. I mean, everyone in my office spends all day doing 3D rendering.
Clue : if the speed at which windows are blitted to the screen is the rate determining step in you workflow, you're probably not getting paid enough.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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."
i on_notes.html#nVidia... just wanted to get the message out there to protect the penguins
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_installat
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Excellent troll my friend. Explain http://www.desktoplinux.com/index.html
Out of the 4 Desktops and 1 laptop in my home, 2 dual-boot, 3 are full time Linux.(All Debian) All of them gamers.
With an NVidia Graphics card Linux is a viable desktop. For work, web and Leisure.
Free Software is not a hobby, it is a way of life.
I look forward to the money I will save and you will spend on Vista. I look forward to the knowledge I will gain and you will be ignorant of. I look forward to modifying my system and my code to my liking, while you look forward to being locked out, broken apps and slashed features, and unsolvable crashes. (lest I forget the required reboots and reinstalls)
To each his own.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
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.
Where's your line breaks?
Bad Slashdotter. No cookie.
Regarding your problems, I'm not surprised. The last time I had an ATI card, I had to manually hack the Linux drivers, as they were autodetecting my system as using AGP 2.0, when it was AGP 3.0 (AGP 8x). Now, I have two PCI Express systems, so that wouldn't be a problem, except that experience was enough to put me off of ATI on Linux, and I haven't bought an ATI card since, except the one in this Powerbook.
Once I got it working (by commenting out autodetection and hardcoding AGP 3.0), I still had similar problems to yours -- I never really tried TV out, but I never, ever had the ability to play video properly while using the proprietary ATI drivers. The open source DRI drivers worked fine, of course, but they didn't have any 3D acceleration at all, much less the extensions required by UT2003. So I had to choose, on boot, whether I wanted to be able to watch video or play games.
Basically, even the parts of the driver that were open source (the AGP acceleration) sucked. The closed parts sucked even more, especially because I could actually fix the open parts, but not the closed ones.
My next video card was nVidia, and I've never looked back. Almost completely proprietary, but they keep it up to date with every new kernel and kernel feature I try. I have a fairly custom kernel -- 64-bit, patched for Reiser4 and recent open source drivers straight from my gigabit card manufacturer, lots of custom hacks here and there -- but all I ever have to do is "emerge nvidia-kernel" whenever I get a new kernel. And everything works as well or better than any open source drivers I've had -- I can do XvMC (hardware-accelerated mpeg decoding), or just xv (X Video extension) which almost always looks good, fullscreen, antialiased by mplayer, at 1600x1200, no matter what the video is. Any game that I can get to work on Linux, period, never has any problems from the video drivers -- stuff just works.
My only ATI card left is something I had to get for my server, which I built as a second desktop machine, with the same motherboard as my desktop -- which was built for PCI Express, which does not boot unless it has a PCI Express card in there, even though the BIOS would seem to suggest that I could use a standard, $5 bargain-bin PCI video card. Problem was, although the PCI video card works fine, it won't boot at all unless there's a PCI Express card in there. So I got a $50 ATI card, which has the added advantage that, for another $10 or so, I got a tuner card to go with it. If I ever get around to it, I can set up MythTV on that box.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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!
o/~ Join us now and share the software
However, to spoil your nitpick, but won't there be free third party data files (maybe even Id software's demo levels too) that you can use with your free software Quake 3 binary?
Indeed.
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)
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Try the r300 driver. See my post here: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191304&t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=15724881# 15725179
If it's no on fire, it's a hardware problem.
..you must mean free drivers, since Quake 3 isn't free :)
So tell me, what the source packages on this page are about.
Let me quote the most relevant entry on that page:
Q3A 1.27g Game Source This is the combined source code for Quake III Arena and Quake III: Team Arena. It can be used to build the 1.27g point release or the Team Arena release. It contains buildable project files and all related game source code as well as prebuilt tool executables.
It is released under the GPL. How is that not free software?
Ah, you mean the game data? You can get that for free as well abeit with some limits, and as a matter of fact there are free and Free datafiles for quake 3 that do not need the data files from ID software to work.
There's a similar effort for ATI drivers. See my post here: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191304&t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=15724881# 15725179
If it's no on fire, it's a hardware problem.
And I saw Linus Torvad on a potato chip.
That's nothing. I saw a burrito on RMS.
KFG
From the article,
"Installing Nvidia drivers is simple, straight-forward, and usually incorporated into your distribution's package repository. For example, Fedora Core 5 offers GeForce driver revisions 8756 and 8762 through select repositories, so installation involves little more than invoking Yellow Dog Updater, Modified (YUM) or YUM Extender (YUMEX). Nvidia clearly wins on this front, because ATI doesn't offer this luxury."
The last few updates of the ATI drivers I have recieved have been done so via YUM on FC5. In fact I'm due for an upgrade now,
yum check-update
...
...
kernel.i686
kmod-fglrx.i686
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
I'm still looking for any graphics card with amd64 Linux drivers that supports either dual-dvi with accelerated portrait mode (1200x1600 x2), or dual-link DVI (2560x1600). Matrox have some that will do it, but only with proprietary drivers and only on ia32.
Peter
You mispelled that.
;)
"Fixed in CVS!!!1!eleventy"
There, fixed that for ya
Technology tips and tricks.
Are you sure that the driver is unaccelerated? I thought that the open source drivers (both ATI and nVidia) were 2D-accelerated, but lacked 3D acceleration. I haven't had slow performance on the (2D) desktop for ages.
ATI's track record of Linux support is appauling, the most recent example being their pulling support for all pre-R300 cards. They also flatly refuse to assist DRI developers working on the R300, claiming that their own driver 'supports' the R300 and above line. But in all honesty, that 'support' is patchy at best, and the writing is on the wall for R300 support as well - pretty soon only the new X1xx cards will be supported.
...
Locking when switching between X and a console are NOT FIXED despite what the article says - ATI simply marked the bug page in bugzilla as 'fixed'. There are lockups with XGL. The XPRESS chipset is very badly supported and very slow - my friend's Turion-based laptop with an XPRESS chipset plays UT2004 slower than my Athlon XP 1600 with an original Radeon 7200 with DRI drivers! 2D performance is pathetic. There is no XRENDER acceleration. Suspending / hibernating doesn't work. XCOMPOSITE support is non-existant. The list goes on and on.
If people want a gaming card, buy an nVidia, or you will be sorry. If gaming isn't so important, buy a something with an Intel chipset - they have excellent open-source drivers, and are only getting better. I installed XGL on a laptop with an Intel i945G card last weekend, and I was shocked by it's impressive performance - XGL in particular was as smooth as I've ever seen it