Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Arc Riley]

>  NVidia's track record for Linux support is better.  Hmmm, no.
> NVidia's track record for Linux support sucks less.


You know I've had far, far fewer problems with Radeons than nVidia over the
past 7 years.

I've had nVidia drivers that break USB2 support, that breaks SATA support,
that just doesn't support the latest four kernel microversions, that cause
the kernel to panic randomly throughout the day, that cause Xorg to severely
memory leak until it segfaults, that doesn't work with various AGP chipsets
(until a new driver release a few months later that replaces this with other
bugs),

Of the 6 nVidia cards I own one of them, an nForce 4, still cannot be used
with GNU/Linux because it causes periodic X lockups, while working fine on
Windows 2000.

I have had zero, zero problems with the free DRI Radeon drivers.  r200,
r300, works great, has for at least 4 years.  If you'll remember ATI
released the specs to the r200 series years ago to the DRI team.  Even when
r300 was called "experimental" and "beta" I still found no faults in it, and
I'm fairly well known for finding obscure bugs.

For those using ATI's proprietary fglrx drivers, saying nVidia's proprietary
drivers are better is like advocating a product because it's shit stinks
less.  Proprietary drivers are always crap.

The point is, ATI has cooperated with the community in the past, unless you
were spending more than $50 on a video card the free drivers worked great,
and a few months ago AMD pledged to do so more fully in the future and has
followed through with that promise.  There's a flurry of activity in the DRI
team implementing the several thousand pages of specs at a breakneck speed
and almost every Radeon is supported now.

Yes, they're dropping fglrx support.  AMD realizes what everyone needs to
realize, writing proprietary drivers for GNU/Linux is just not reasonable.
There's a large, energetic community of volunteers who want nothing more
than the specs, and they'll do a better job with free drivers than AMD with
a team of paid employees could ever do.  It's not the paradigm they're used
to, so it's taken them time to understand how things work in our community.

Boycott nVidia until they understand this, too.  Proprietary drivers are a
fine pragmatic solution when you already own one, but when in the market for
a new video card look for "Radeon".
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