Chris,
thanks for your efforts and providing a working card with NVidia chipset for
Trisquel. The last few days I played around with Trisquel 5.5 as well with
big success. So far I was able to run the following games on my gaming box
under Trisquel:
- Xonotic
- Darkplaces with the mod Kleshik
- Open Arena
- Ryzom
- Red Eclipse
- ActionCube
Specs of my gaming box:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2x2.7GHz)
4 GB DDR2 RAM
ALiveXFire-eSATA2 motherboard
Galaxy nVidia Geforce 9800 GT 512
Realtek-based PCIe 1GB NIC (since my mainboard NIC requires non-free
firmware)
I tested Trisquel 5.5 also on my old Shuttle barebone (AMD Athlon XP 2800+ /
GeForce 4 Ti 4400 / 1GB RAM) with success. I could play the less demanding
FPS available (OpenArena, ActionCube, Red Eclipse at lower details). This is
a tremendeous increase in regard to stability. The last time I tried Noveau
half a year ago, it instantly crashed after playing 2 minutes OpenArena on
the GF4. Pretty much the same applies for gaming on the GF9800. While
Darkplaces was running stable and quite fast with Mesa 7.11 under Knoppix 6.5
I experienced some graphical corruptions which do not exist anymore in
Trisquel 5.5.
While it might be fine NOT to recommend NVidia or ATI cards from a free
software aspect I find it actually pointless to do so unless there is a valid
option for AMD / ATI users. So unless Intel (or some other company -> I just
do not see any competition) does release a PCIe-based graphic adapter with
good open-source support, we need to stick to NVidia, since ATI cards rely on
non-free firmware files which are unsupported by the linux-libre kernel.
Personally I find it dangerous to buy Intel-based stuff only. Mainly for two
reasons:
1) Intel is still way behind the competition in terms of GPU performance and
features. I am afraid that it will stay like that for quite a while.
2) While AMD CPUs are often not so powerfull as their Intel pendant they
still provide a "better bang for the buck". You often get a 4 or 6 core CPU
for lower prices from AMD than their Intel pendant. I do not want to think
about what will happen with CPU prices again when Intel would rule the
market. We had this situation several years ago when Intel had fast FPU
performance (Celeron 400 and the alike) while AMD only had their crappy AMD
K6-2 with AMD 3D Now. It was awfull. Strengthening the market position of
Intel does to the PC market what M$ did to the operating system market.
Please allow me a few comments in regard to the 9500GT you sell:
1st: It is not THE CARD ! Why ? Simply because most cards in the same or
close GPU family will perform equaly in terms of stability. This includes but
is not limited to GF8600 / GF8800 (newer versions with 256 or 512MB RAM) /
GF9500 / GF9600 / GF9800). I would epxpect that even older cards from the
7000er family perform equally good. Of course older cards or those with lower
specs will perform a bit worse but I bet that some of the older faster NVidia
cards (e.g. 8600) will outperform even the latest Intel GPUs. At least if you
crank up resolution and/or details.
The 9500GT simply performs with Noveau at an identical level as the
propritary blob because the GPU itself is the bottleneck. One can easily
check out the Noveau benchmarks over at phoronix and it is pretty obvious
that mostly older, slower NVidia cards perform either identical or even
faster with Noveau. As soon as cards of a higher performance level are used,
you can clearly see that Nouveau performs at a much lower level compared to
the proprietary driver. Sometimes 3-4 times slower.
Personally I would have rather choosed a card with passive cooling and lower
RAM. 512MB is absolutely sufficient for the 9500GT chip since it doesn't have
the horsepower to push higher texture details and AA anyway. For comparison:
My 9800GT also has only 512MB and I was able to play Rage as well as Deus Ex
Human Revolution at pleasing details. A 9500GT would struggle here.
For those with enough money I suggest supporting Chris and buy the card he
offers. For those who are on budget I suggest having a look at used graphic
adapters with the chipsets I mentioned above. I bought three graphic adapters
over the last year (GF8600GT, GF9500GT, GF9800GT) from ebay and never payed
more than 20€ including shipment for them. Noisy, damaged or simply dusty
GPU coolers can be easily replaced by both active or passive models for
little to no money. I just mention this option again because I think a lot of
people also use Linux since it does not cost you any license royalties which
makes it the perfect OS if you are on budget.
Since most graphic adapters (if not all) are built in countries with a
oppressive government under bad conditions for both environment as well as
for the workers I think to some extent it is even more important to NOT
follow any new trend and buy new hardware every year. To some extent this is
the reason why I dislike buying a new NIC (USB / PCI / PCIe) for a "free"
Linux which does not support my hardware because of lack of firmware support.
I have to "free" my system by buying hardware build from non-free peoples in
non-free countries. But this are just my two cents on this topic. I am just
writing this since I think that you should not give recommendations on
hardware based on moral decisions. Keep it technical. Hardware XY does not
work because a binary blob is required while hardware AB does work, so sell
it. End of the story. IMO Intel is not "ethically better" than AMD or NVidia
and vice versa.
If it helps I can do some further tests with Trisquel and my 9800GT. I own
several native Linux titles (e.g. Amnesia, Shadowground, Shadowground
Survirors, Trine). So I could easily test them and give feedback if they
work. Those titles are non-free though but it might help people to decide
wether Trisquel plus a NVidia-based card is something they can live with or
not. Oh yes, and I could test other free stuff as well (Alien Arena, Reqction
Quake and so on). While the 9800 is of course not 100% identical to the
9500GT you sell, they still share the same GPU architecture.
Regards,
Holger
