>It is not THE CARD ! Why ? Simply because most cards in the same or close
GPU >family will perform equaly in terms of stability.
I'd generally agree with this statement. I'm generalising a bit here and
factoring in various things. This card comes recommended specifically because
it is the best performance/stability/etc combination that works with the free
software driver for NVidia. You could say any GeForce 8/9 series card should
work fairly well. In truth this isn't always the case and we don't have any
way to produce a solid list of all the cards. Sticking to a specific set of
cards/devices with specific chipsets is the best way to ensure
adequate/better than average support. The resources to focus on a broad swath
of cards doesn't exist and it is one of the reasons compatibility lists don't
work well even when spread out across a large user base. So there are other
issues I'm factoring in here.
I'll give you an example. In theory just about any N Atheros chipset for PCI
devices should work well. So you would think you could purchase a random PCIe
card as long as you made sure you had an Atheros chipset. The problem is
there are many PCIe cards that are problematic although only on certain
machines. Even where two cards share the same chipset one may work and the
other not.
So yes- you can purchase a random card and it might work great. I wouldn't
advise it though. Your choice in cards is a good example. While there is
nothing wrong with the decision to purchase the 9800GT the 9500GT works
better right now. And I'm in no way an authority on this specific issue.
However, this is not my evaluation- we went to the founder of phoronix, whom
writes about the subject intensely, has many cards, gets pre-release
hardware, writes software to evaluate, benchmark, and test graphics
chipsets/cards and the various drivers.
While I think more people should try and make decisions based on the ethical
implications the recommendations / evaluations are not actually based on
this. There are technical benefits from using only free software. Many of
these relate to compatibility and support. Without free software we couldn't
adequately or honestly claim support for the hardware.
I think you made a good point on the 1GB spec being overkill for this card.
The reason for the 1GB spec is not a technical one though. Rather it was a
business decision. One thing you have to understand about sales is spec's
sell. It doesn't matter if a card is better/worse. If we were to offer a
512MB version you would likely see a negative impact on the sales. That isn't
going to be good. It means we would be less likely/able to expand our
offerings.
The plan of action right now is to see how this sells and then add a 512MB
version if the demand exists.
As far as the 9800GT vs 9500GT goes the cards aren't sufficiently different
enough to worry about it. If the 9800GT supports it with the nouveau driver
so should the 9500GT (even if it isn't as true the other way around).
That said we could definitely use assistance evaluating games. While I'm
interested in a compiling a complete list of compatible games in-house to
better grasp the status of the free driver we won't list any games that are
dependent on the non-free driver or games that are non-free.
The artwork does not have to be released under a free license. The software
should be however. With that in mind the wikipedia link below contains a list
of free games we would love to see evaluate (and anything else you know of
which is not on this list). I'll add them to the product page and start a
wiki page on our site if the list grows long enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games
If you have to do anything special (commands, etc) we will add a page for it
in our support section. If you guys have screen shots I'll add it to our site
as well. The current software directory though that we maintain isn't yet
available on http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/. There are still non-free
components listed (mostly graphics drivers and things of that nature which
can be removed). We have included in the descriptions to point out non-free
package. To better coincide with the free software foundation we will
eventually remove the non-free software listed and link to this page from
http://libre.thinkpenguin.com instead. If anybody wants to go through it and
list links which mention the software is non-free we will remove it from the
directory. The libre link above right now links to the free software
directory (maintained by the FSF). Our goal with our version has always been
to implement a complete solution which integrated with browser plug-ins and
similar. The point was never to duplicate the efforts of other projects like
the free software directory or similar efforts.
