Aidan Gauland wrote, On 14/06/09 14:29:
I'm going to skip the narrative, and just cut to the chase: which video
cards better support Linux, and sleep/hibernate on Linux. It looks as
if there are better open-source ATI drivers than there are for NVIDIA,
but I don't know about stability. I'm asking because I need to shop for
a new video card. I really just care about what works best, and not
what is most free (as defined by the FSF).
Hard call. The ATI open source driver is better than the NV one, but
that's only a concern for the OS zealot. The NVidia binary driver works
really quite well, and is packaged in most distros these days, albeit in
some kind of restricted repo or source.
The other hit against NVidia lately is their bad handling of the
substrate engineering issue.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1013947/nvidia-should-defective-chips
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-GPU-failure,6248.html
So while its more aimed at laptops, the issue will exist on all recent
nvidia cards.
Personally - get a cheap card and if it breaks, buy another one. Even
the cheap ones will be better than your old card.
Or consider a board replacement to get PCIe if you don't already have it.
--
Craig Falconer
