Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

Jarod Wilson jarod at wilsonet.com
Tue Jun 10 16:10:14 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 15:37 -0400, Mark Komarinski wrote:
> 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.

I've never had an issue with x86_64 vs. i386 either, but nVidia's
drivers do tend to break in new and amusing ways every new kernel and/or
X server release. They're mostly busted even in their current beta
driver for 2.6.25 kernels and xorg 1.5.

> >   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.

Then you're doing it wrong. ;)

I hotplug a second monitor to my laptop w/Intel graphics pretty much
every day (one monitor attached to the dock in my office, another I just
plug in directly at home when I'm downstairs at my desk). Only caveat is
you do have to run an xrandr command or run the Screen Resolution applet
to get it to come up the first time after booting if you booted w/o a
monitor attached, but after that, it always comes up automagically. Of
course, this is all on Fedora 9 with xrandr 1.2...

> 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.

I do still like nVidia cards for a desktop where I want dual-head and
high-performance 3D, and Intel doesn't make anything but integrated
graphics chips anyway (i.e., no agp or pci-e cards)...


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com



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