Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Ben Scott]

  [Author's warning: Possible controversy ahead.]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Arc Riley <arcriley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some of those limitations come from Mesa ...

  One potential advantage to NVidia's proprietary solution is that it
comes with its own OpenGL implementation, which (from what I've read)
may work better than Mesa for some applications.  YMMV, obviously.  It
wouldn't surprise me to hear that Mesa is better at some things,
whatever-NVidia-uses is better at others.  I dunno.

> It's a fairly uncommon chipset mostly used in laptops, and like many things
> for laptops, support is unpredictable.

  Another potential advantage to NVidia: They provide a "unified"
driver.  In theory, the single "nvidia" driver is used for all their
hardware, be it laptop, desktop, integrated, discrete, or Quadro Plex.
 One driver, one set of config file options.

  Now, it turns out the unified driver is not so unified -- NVidia
releases different builds of it.  Some builds are tuned for different
goals (e.g., speed for gaming cards, stability/accuracy for
professional graphics cards).  Not all builds support all hardware,
either.  Older cards eventually fall out of the "main" build line, and
get moved to a "legacy" line which is updated less often.  But it's
all one codebase, which might make things easier to manage.

  It seems likely to me that the NVidia proprietary drivers will
gradually phase out support for old hardware, going from mainstream
support to legacy support to "hope you don't mind running last year's
kernel".  Not good for people who keep hardware for a long time.  :(

  One will have to weigh the potential advantages in the above against
the well-known disadvantages of {non-free, proprietary, binary-only,
closed source} drivers.

> Remember, AMD only released the specs a few months ago ...

  Exactly.

  NVidia has been supporting Linux-on-i386 pretty consistently for
several years now.  There support is nowhere as good as one would
like, but it is *consistent*.  To echo what Bill McG wrote, I think
that is the reason NVidia gets recommended/suggested: People have been
able to put some measure of trust in NVidia.  Things have been stable
long enough for experience, procedures, documentation, and support
infrastructure to be built around the proprietary drivers.  ATI, on
the other hand, has a history of jerking Linux users around, and this
latest attempt is still only one-in-a-row.

  In particular, calling for a boycott of NVidia when their support of
Linux has been a lot more consistent and reliable than ATI's strikes
me as rude.  For all we know, ATI will fall off the Linux bandwagon
again next month -- it's happened multiple times before, so this is
not baseless speculation -- and we'll be back to NVidia being the only
game in town.

  Personally, I'm hoping I can hold out against buying a new video
card until things improve.  Either to let ATI establish a better track
record, or maybe for NVidia to open things up more, or for some other
hardware vendor to release a decent 3D accelerator.  But I'm getting
tired of playing Portal at only 1024x768... :-(

-- Ben