Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Labitt, Bruce]

-----Original Message-----
From: gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org
[mailto:gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Ben Scott
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 3:19 PM
To: Greater NH Linux User Group
Subject: Re: Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> I'd recomment another brand, preferably one with an opensource driver
so you
> don't have my issues.

  Are there any decent graphics cards with decent Open Source drivers?
 I was under the impression there were none.

  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".

  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.

-- Ben

The Intel chipset locked up my machine when I ran the VTK test suite.
First I got a blank screen with an arrow cursor, then I got solid black.
It was black on all the other consoles, too.  Hmm, too bad I hadn't
saved everything in the other windows... :(  Only thing I could do at
that point was RESET.

So Ben, am I SOL for 64 bit decent speed rendering?  Or is there a
solution?  I would be using Open GL 2.0.

As it stands, I would need to upgrade the power supply on my computer
just so I can plug in one of these snazzy new GPUs.  The optiplex only
has a 305W supply with a substandard +12V rail, AFAIK.

--Bruce