On Wednesday 29 July 2009 08:29:06 Frank D. wrote: > You might want to consider saving some cash and just using onboard video, > the onboard stuff isn't bad if you're not looking to play games.
Joe has been doing a bunch of 1080p video stuff which requires either a decent videocard with built-in HD video decoder or a hefty CPU. Personally I never recommend onboard video because I find it typical to change video cards about once every 1.5 years, especially for gamers, and I don't like sharing onboard RAM with the video. Also Joe just got done being burnt by getting a motherboard with onboard video that was troublesome to support under Linux, so I definitely understand his desire for not going down that route again. > If you're looking for good performance under Linux, ATI drivers are pretty > much garbage anyway. I can't speak from personal experience but I've read that ATI card performance these days is actually higher under Linux than it is under Windows. And if the ATI driver is open source, that is a nontrivial consideration. Consider the way that Nvidia drivers currently work -- they're periodically split off into separate packages which are then not supported, and the newer drivers deprecate older cards. Then what happens is that both the Linux kernel and X.org are updated such that the old drivers that are no longer supported require updating before they will function again. :-/ (I'm currently dealing with this problem with several older Nvidia cards, all of which are in different states of brokeness.) Repeat that cycle a few times and you can understand why having an open source driver that others can support is a big deal. And this also explains why binary blobs can _never_ fully fit our needs. I think this also explains why ATI went away from the binary-only model -- because it similarly creates forced obsolescence and thus pisses people off. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jul 1 - Linux High Performance Computing Aug 5 - TBD Sept 2 - Linux and HDTV
