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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Hm, 5x12=120? You went to an American school didn't you, or do you live on some other planet that has 24 months in a year?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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).
If it's no on fire, it's a hardware problem.