Re: Best supported and rendering card

[Thomas Steffen <steffen dot list dot account at gmail dot com>]

On 9/28/05, Pablo Fischer <pablo at pablo dot com dot mx> wrote:
> However, I'd like to hear suggestions for ATI cards? I'm looking
> for an AGP card that supports TV-OUT.
>
> By the way, 30% of the time play 3D games (Wolfstein under Linux) and
> 70% I hack on PHP, so I don't need the super-card only for playing video
> games.
>
> * How about 9600? Any comments?


First of all I like ATI cards, and I still think that the basic quality is
usually better than nVidia. However, that cannot be said for the drivers.
While they are very configurable, they are also riddled with an amazing
number of bugs. I have an ATI 9600, and it does not work with the free
drivers (tested XFree 4.3 and X.org <http://X.org> 6.8) unless you
completely disable acceleration.

The proprietary 3D drivers from ATI are ok, but rather difficult to install.
The fglrx-package helps a lot, but there are still issues. Configuration is
an absolute nightmare. Dual monitor configurations do not work correctly.
The 3D speed is ok, but not great, and certainly behind what is possible on
Windows. Switching consoles often crashes the system.

So all in all the Radeon 9600 is not a great card for Linux. If you get it
very cheap, it should be ok, but otherwise I would look for alternatives. I
heard that the Radeon 9800 has quite a bit more performance (but I don't
know about the number of problems :-)).

Sticking with nVidia might also be an option. Ok, you have to use the binary
driver, but given that the free driver does not really work for recent ATI
cards either, this is not much of a difference. I heard that 3D performance
is better under Linux, probably because the drivers are more optimised.

Thomas