Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Arc Riley]

>  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.


Compatibility issues come up.

Many of us don't like Mesa very much, and there have been various attempts
to replace it, but Mesa sticks around because it's well supported.

I cannot tell you how many issues have come up because nVidia uses different
OpenGL headers, to the point that it sometimes even breaks between legacy
and main.  It's a support nightmare.

If nVidia wasn't so hostile to our developer community they might have
helped upgrade Mesa or even lead an effort for a replacement that works for
all vendor's drivers.  Instead, like good monopolists, they've leveraged
their market share to force us all to support their vendor-specific
implementation.


 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.


Um, no.  2 drivers.  Some of my test systems here have to use the main,
others legacy.

There are 2 free radeon drivers as well, the standard and the new radeonhd
being developed primarily by AMD and Novell employees.  There is no separate
driver for laptops, less common chipsets (which Mobility x1700 certainly
falls into) have lower priority for devs, and that's reasonable.

There are 2 free nVidia 2D drivers as well, X's nv and nouveau.


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


Exactly, and nVidia has never released their specs.  Not for even one
chipset.  Not even just registers.  Nothing, zero, complete
non-cooperation.  They only thing they've contributed is a statement that
they will not sue the Nouveau project.  How generous of them.


ATI, on the other hand, has a history of jerking Linux users around, and
> this
> latest attempt is still only one-in-a-row.


Before this last release ATI previously released the r100/r200 specs, and
later released r300 specs under a free software compatible NDA to a few DRI
developers.  There's a track record here, even if a bit discontinuous.

Meanwhile, the Nouveau project is having to reverse engineer everything.
There's been numerous requests which nVidia consistently denies.  They are
the only mainstream GPU manufacturer (SiS I'm not counting) to do so - AMD,
Intel, and Via have each not only released the specs but funded free driver
development.

So how is it did you obtain the viewpoint that nVidia is being cooperative
with the community while ATI is jerking us around?  If you ask me, when you
have benign, completely non trade secret information like register data for
your chipsets that you force people to figure out the long, tedious way when
all you have to do is email it to them, that's jerking people around.


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.


Now that's just FUD.

First of all, ATI is no longer ATI.  They were purchased by AMD, and AMD is
the one who released the specs.  AMD has a GOLDEN track record for
cooperating with the free software community to ensure Linux drivers were
written and in the main kernel tree in a timely fashion.  One of their first
moves after purchasing ATI was announcing they'd be releasing all the
specs.  ATI is now just a subdivision and brand name.

Second, if AMD decided tomorrow to completely discontinue any and all
Linux/Xorg support we still have the specs.  Novell has been a valuable
partner in this and along with the community-based groups (DRI, etc) will
ensure the drivers are maintained.

OTOH, nVidia has the exclusive power to kill Linux support for their
chipsets.  They just axe the team writing them, presto, support isn't
maintained for future kernel versions.  Of course the community would cry
out about this, but we'd be powerless to change it.

Despite your expressed brand loyalty, their track record is really not that
good.  Consistently their drivers lack support for newer kernels and cards,
their custom OpenGL implementation causes build issues with 3D applications,
and then there's the unpredictable support gaps with certain GPU revisions
or card configurations.
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