[GRLUG] NVidia or ATI

[Tim Schmidt]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Steve Romanow <slestak989 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I second the vote for nvidia.

And I heartily disagree.

The question was which cards are more _reliable_.

Since Nvidia's cards are _impossible_ for the community to support at
the moment (as they are not documented at all, and the most advanced
effort to reverse engineer them - the Nouveau project - has yet to
bear any usable fruit).

If the question was which cards are most performant, Nvidia might be
the current answer (though ATI's proprietary drivers are speedy as
well).  That performance comes at _huge_ short and long term cost,
however.

Do you want a card that can reliably suspend and re-awaken?  One that
can take advantage of the newest Compiz and kernel modesetting
features?  One that works reliably with the latest X and kernel
releases?  For these questions and more, Nvidia is decidedly _not_ the
answer.

ATI makes many cards that are both fast, and supported by FOSS drivers
and NDA-free documentation.  Intel makes integrated graphics chipsets
that are often the first to support new graphics features in the FOSS
world, and are reasonably power efficient.  Via makes integrated
graphics chipsets that have open drivers, though they're not yet well
documented - Harold Welte (of netfilter fame) is working with Via to
fix this.

Nvidia makes cards that are fast.  And impossible for the community to support.

So what are your priorities?

--tim