On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 02:06 +0300, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'll go with NVidia if you don't care about open source drivers. They
> have excellent support in dual screen support.
> Intel... not very good support. good drivers, but I had my share of a
> garbage cursor on the 2nd screen.
> ATI/AMD - Pretty good but PRAY that your card is supported in their
> latest drivers or else if you find a bug on an older drivers
> (discontinued card), then that's your problem :)
> 
> Good luck
> Hetz

While I'm using nVidia (on a large number of machines) I'm thinking
about switching to AMD/ATI.
A couple of reasons.

A. Having an OSS driver is big plus. While it may or may not use the OSS
driver, having the -option- to use an OSS drivers when the binary driver
fails and/or you're trying to use unsupported software/OS combo * should
be taken into account. If you use nVidia, you're limited to what-ever
OS/arch/etc nVidia chose for you.

B. The current driver family (16x.xx and 17x.xx) has miserable 2D
performance. In nVidia's defense, they are working hard to solve these
problems, but as it stands, my 11 y/o PII233/MAC64 laptop, with it's
patched DRI driver, literally run circles around my 2xE5335/GF9800GTX
workstation in 2D.

C. nVidia is a -very- annoying tendency to kill the support for older
cards unexpectedly - switching to very problematic legacy drivers. And
as you're limited to binary drivers, once nVidia drops to the support
for your card, you're screwed.


As it stand, if you only require 2D with limited 3D (Read: compiz and
friends) an older ATI card (r300/r400-based **) should suite you best.
Make sure you do some digging (@google) on the target card before buying
it.

- Gilboa
* Xen under both Linux and Solaris, FreeBSD/AMD64, PPC/PPC64/SPARC/etc.
** 9800*, X300/600/800.



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