Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 15:34 -0400, Tom Buskey wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>         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,
> 
> At least there is an open source driver being worked on.

Two, actually. There's the old stand-by 2d-only nv driver, and the new
nouveau driver, which actually does have some basic 3d support. I've got
the nouveau driver running on a few cards. Doesn't hold a candle to the
binary driver in terms of performance, but its getting worked on...

Also, there *is* an open-source driver being worked on for all recent
ATI hardware. AMD has been slowly releasing information and helping out
a bit with driver development, and has partnered with Novell in some
form, iirc, to work on it.

>         Intel purportedly provides full specs for their graphics
>         chipsets,
>         but the hardware itself is slow and feature-poor.

Yep, Intel has indeed released all the specs on their latest generation
of integrated graphics controllers (I have copies of everything laying
around somewhere on my laptop, they can be found in various places on
the 'net).

Slow and feature-poor is relative. Intel's graphics hardware certainly
ain't for gamers, but it does support dual-head, has reasonable 3d
acceleration for basic tasks, low power consumption (great in laptops),
and fully open-source drivers. I'm quite partial to Intel graphics
myself, I explicitly chose to go that route when I bought my new laptop
back in December (vs. the option of nVidia).

> I used to have a Matrox G450 under RedHat 9 (not Fedora) that I really
> liked.  It may have been a PCI board even.

Yeah, not bad cards, I've got a dual-DVI agp one in a ppc64 box here.



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com