Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Mark Komarinski]

On 06/10/2008 03:19 PM, Ben Scott wrote:
> NVidia makes nice cards, but the Open Source driver is buggy,
> feature-poor, and slow.  NVidia has a proprietary, binary-only driver
> which is fast and has more features, but it breaks every time there's
> a kernel change, and you're SOL if you don't define "Linux" as
> "certain 2.6.x kernels on i386 32-bit".
>   
Really?  My x86_64 Fedora 8 desktop (with twinview) would like a word 
with you. I use the Livna repository and rarely have dependency issues 
between an updated NVidia driver and/or Fedora kernel.  YMMV for other 
distros, and it's one of the things I need to verify before converting 
this box to Ubuntu.  I had a harder time getting flash working than 
getting my video card set properly.
>   Same with ATI, except their Linux support is worse and their
> graphics hardware has sometimes had trouble keeping up with NVidia's
> latest.
>
>   Intel purportedly provides full specs for their graphics chipsets,
> but the hardware itself is slow and feature-poor.
>   
The Intel hardware (or drivers) stink when doing anything more advanced 
than running a single monitor.  I've had no end of trouble setting up 
two monitors on systems.

The NVidia cards work perfectly every time, and I've been setting them 
up for dual head and for 3D visualization for about 6 years.  I don't 
like the fact they're not open source, but this is one of the few cases 
where I just hold my nose and use it anyway.  There really aren't any 
viable alternatives.

-Mark