JH> On Wed, 14 Nov 2001 02:56, you wrote: >> First of all I must say I am not an nvidia fanatic or >> so, I dont like the drivers be closed-source either. >> But I believe that nvidia cards are the best opengl >> cards around,and despite the source is closed, nvidia >> is doing a great job for linux. For the following, >> there are things to be corrected. All I am saying here >> have been tested with nvidia tnt2 ultra, geforce DDR >> and geforce 2 MX.
JH> Back to the original question: Best Video Cards for Linux: JH> nVidia uses either unaccelerated , 2-D only drivers which *are* supported JH> or JH> closed-source drivers from nVidia which are *not* supported (by either the JH> distro vendor or nVidia) JH> Now, not to say that the closed-source drivers do not work - there are tons JH> of people who have working, accelerated nVidia cards running under various JH> distros. (note that there are also tons of people who cannot make the driver JH> work no matter how hard they try. JH> This is logical given all the various models, RAM configs & BIOS revs. of the JH> cards themselves, plus all the mobos & other paraphenalia that make up the JH> h/w config itself. I have been to many groups around, and I did not come across ppl, that has " Xfree drivers work, but nvidia's dont" lately. If there is such a thing I hear, it is mostly 85 % the fault of the user. Of course there were many troubles within the developement of the nvidia side. I remember that i815 + agpgart trouble and it was a really mess. The thing is, the solution had come from nvidia first, before it came from the GNU/Linux side. Nvidia does not tell you "do this and that" person by person, but at least they also have a good documentation, they make the drivers for many of the distros (which is not necessary for so many ppl,as setting the tar.gz is not hard either) and they solve the problems. At least they did until now. JH> The implications for this are simple, however - if you want support under JH> Linux, from either your distro vendor or the card vendor, an nVIDIA will not, JH> at the current time, give you this. JH> If you're happy tweaking, trawling the net, and (small percentage), having to JH> give up, then the nVIDIA cards can provide a ripper of a card I think we should not consider nvidia as a company like conextant. (HCF is the horror of many ppl). They are doing fine now, but the question is, how long will it go on like this? As nvidia bought 3dfx, there is not much competition left for them in the fast-3D world (I put aside matrox and ati, they are worse in performance but better in other stuff like tv support). As their drivers are not open sourced, if they come and say " we give up the linux support", I guess we wont have much left in our hands. But I dont know if nvidia will do such a thing, as I assume so many ppl are buying nvidia because of the good linux support(I really wonder how many hits does the nvidia linux download page have). Maybe it may not be support, as they dont answer your questions, but they release good drivers, easy to set up, write documents, release versions of drivers for different distros, so it is more than half of "support". As long as it works great, does it matter if nvidia is a GNU fan or not ? Of course I wish they had released the drivers open source, but I am not sure that they will. Nvidia's success is not only in making the hardware, but they write very good drivers too. With every driver version you get more fps. They may be keen on not releasing this to public. This may cause them a lot of loss in the market. As long as nvidia gives me what I want in linux, I will go on using them. Because right now they are the best. But if it will change (personally I dont think it will change, they would not dare to), then I will go search for another. Onur Kucuk _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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