On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 14:56 +0200, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote: > Intel 3D graphics sucks, both in terms of performance and both in > terms of drivers. I have here i845 chipset and it's 3D has lots of > problems (I did some tests with the X11 OpenGL screensavers, many of > them only show in the upper half of the screen, no matter how shared > memory I gave).
While I also haven't seen standalone intel GMAs (not integrated into the mobo), my experience with the latest versions of intel GMAs have been exceptionally good - I had minor problems with the 915 on suspend and resume, but they seem to have been solved in the latest drivers from X.org. 3D performance is very good - at least for my needs, which is running desktop effects and occasionally Google Earth and some minor games. > Vidia on the other hand has very good and stable 3D under XFree/Xorg, > although the drivers are closed source if you care about this issue. Its important to remember that the nVidia X.org drivers are at least a year, maybe two, behind the windows drivers in terms of performance and feature support (although I heard that the 9xxx versions, currently in beta, are much better in that regard). At least on one machine (nForce with GF6680) the nVidia drivers feature annoying artifacts in 3D mode, while the open source drivers work perfectly (albeit much slower). The ATI drivers are good and useful if they are available pre-packaged for your distribution (and you're not in the habit of installing new kernels every couple of days). Otherwise they are a pain to setup and maintain. I'm using currently Fedora Core and Mandriva, and while Livna distributes quality packages for Fedora Core stable, don't plan to rely on them if you want to use testing, rawhide or - god forbid - compile your own kernel. The PLF guys OTOH have great support for Mandriva both official and cooker - probably because dkms is such a great idea, and you can live peacefully on cooker w/o problems. BTW - the ATI free drivers do enough of a good job to drive desktop effects, so if that's all you need I recommend on grabbing an ATI and using the free drivers. -- Oded ::.. Rule of Open-Source Programming #5: A project is never finished. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
