[Tfug] video card recommendations

[Jim March]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 9:30 PM, Ronald Sutherland <
ronald.sutherland at gmail.com> wrote:

> The NOT OPEN nvidia drivers work on Ubuntu, the open driver is 2D only and
> not very fun...
> From time to time I see things about ATI stuff getting open sourced but not
> sure what the status is... Intel on board video is nice, and seems to work
> every place I try (FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Mandrake...)


Yeah, right now Intel-based cards have the best "genuinely FOSS" video
driver support, by far.  Problem one is that their 3D gaming support is dead
minimal.  Problem two is that you can't get them as add-in cards, they're
either on the motherboard (desktop or laptop) or they're not.  (That's
because they use "shared memory" with the motherboard main RAM.)

NVidia has the best closed-box ("binary blob") drivers right now.
Development of true FOSS drivers has been slow, with buggy alpha 2D drivers
(no Compiz) so far.

ATI's closed-box drivers are pretty good, recently becoming almost on par
with NVidia.  I've done some Compiz installs on ATI-based laptops with
lower-end ATI hardware, so that's cool.  If you're a "FOSS purist", the good
news is that ATI released a metric buttload of tech specs some months back.
The XORG and the like people are still digesting it but we should see
quality FOSS drivers for most of the ATI product "real soon now" - best
estimates say usable betas by the end of '08 at the latest, but, who knows.
Still, major kudos to ATI for sharing data.  You can run their "binary
blobs" for now and assuage your concience knowing you'll be able to fix that
at some point :).

Jim
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