[Tfug] Most stable laptop video drivers

[Adrian]

On Monday 14 January 2013 15:01, Bexley Hall wrote:
> Hi Adrian,
>
> On 1/14/2013 11:50 AM, Adrian wrote:
> > So, after filtering stuff out I'm basically left with laptops that have
> > the following video GPUs:
> > ATI FirePro M5950
> > nVidia Quadro 1000M
> > AMD/ATI Radeon HD 7570M
> >
> > My current/dying laptop has a ATI Radeon x1100 in it, which always worked
> > alright when setup, but was a pain in the butt to initially get working
> > correctly or upgrading the driver. Do any of the above just work
> > out-of-the-box with X? From what I can gather searching around, it looks
> > like the nVidia probably has the best support, the 7570M the least...
> > Anyone with personal experience?
>
> Do you have any other (e.g., performance!) criteria besides "robustness
> of driver"?  Or, do you want to squeeze the balloon at *both* ends?
>

No, not really... I want something that will have great 2D and good 3D out of 
the box without having to jump thru tons of config option/performance tuning 
debug sessions. It should run multiple smooth video streams and window 
display... Nothing fancy, I am not currently doing any 3D work, no fancy 
display managers/Compiz/Barrel/etc.

For example, my current laptop Radeon with the default X drivers has poor 2D 
performance and 3D is(was?) non-existent. With the ATI binary drivers, 2D is 
good and 3D is acceptable, but the ATI drivers completely fail to detect my 
laptop LCD correctly resulting in great pains initially installing the 
drivers (i.e. the ATI drivers want to launch a graphic setup screen on 
install.. which completely fails when it can't correctly detect the display 
dimensions). Likewise, I had to jump thru hoops getting xine to pass frames 
to the video card without huge lag and CPU spikes.

At some point I may do more 3D, maybe a nice auto-setup second diplay when I 
am docked (could never get this to work before), and I will probably being 
doing a second/third virtual machine with VT-d, but that is it. My laptop is 
primarily for work, multiple windows with lots of stuff going on, but nothing 
which should be straining graphics wise.

My laptop requirements should be drop dead simple... but with the homogeneity 
in laptops today aimed at the lowest possible price point, there really isn;t 
much in the way of true customization it seems. Requirements (the non-HD is 
basically impossible for the last several years):
- 15" LCD, non-HD display (i.e 4:3 or 16:10)
- Greater than 1000pix vertical resolution
- Network and power plugs on the same side or corner of the laptop
- Meager HD/RAM, ~200GB and 4GB
- CPU not really important, preferably something with VT extensions and a 
large L3 cache
- DVD-RW drive
- Decent touchpad, centrally placed

It really shouldn;t be that hard, but apparently no one makes a decent work 
laptop anymore. Instead they are all positioned for watching movies on your 
laptop...


Adrian