[PLUG] Linux: ATI or nVidia?

[Eric Wilhelm]

# from Shahms E. King
# on Monday 25 July 2005 05:51 pm:

>ATI cards with 3D supported by the open-source drivers (mostly older
>Radeons) are the best option.  If you want a newer card ...

Wow. ATI actually made an effort to support their cards on Linux.  That 
puts them at least a few years behind nvidia, and of course it's a 
proprietary driver.

In either case, your kernel will be tainted (causes trouble if you're 
reporting kernel bugs.)  Guess there's some tasty IP tangled into that 
driver code that keeps them from opening it.

>nVidia binary drivers are much, much, much better.

At least they've been releasing them for Linux longer.  That's why I 
went with nvidia 2.5 years ago (wow, I guess this dual 4800 is a 
dinosaur now!)  I get some crashes, but it's hard to say whether that 
comes from the motherboard, onboard sound, usb, smp, xinerama, or that 
PCI TNT2 card running the third monitor.  Probably a combination of 
things (something about running out of IRQ's)  If you're going 
single-head and single-cpu, then nvidia is pretty stable.

One caveat:  nvidia doesn't produce their own boards.  They only do the 
chips, so there will be plenty of various brands selling boards with 
nvidia chips.  These are not all created equal!  Namely, MSI is really 
bad.  I'll just take another opportunity to say "stay away from MSI."

MSI is really bad.

BTW, Do not buy an MSI graphics card (or anything else for that matter.)

Look for a card manufacturer with firmware on their website (last I 
looked nvidia says to get the firmware from the card manufacturer.)  
Low quality outfits (like MSI) tell you to get the firmware updates 
from nvidia.

Fans and other bits also fail (or make noise) on cheaper cards.  You get 
what you pay for.

Could anyone with a more pleasant nvidia experience name some quality 
card manufacturers?

--Eric
-- 
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
--Occam's Razor
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