[ale] nvidia news

[Richard Faulkner]

Interesting...

When I spec'd this box back in 2005 I was doing a lot of comparisons
between ATI and Nvidia but the platform was to be XP x64 to run apps
like Blender and Corel and them move to SuSE 10.1 but that move was
delayed for various reasons (lots of bad reviews on 10.1).  

Work kept me so busy that I didn't have time to tinker with my box (just
manage the 1000+ boxes at work) so it wasn't until now that I have the
time to do this.  

Based upon what I'm seeing today, random screen corruption, driver
integration and support issues; I'm not too hot on Nvidia anymore.  I
know ATI didn't have the best track record for Linux which is part of
the reason why I was looking to SuSE and Nvidia combination.  Too bad I
came to not prefer SuSE (9.10 is something that I'm happiest with so
far).

I'm still tinkering with this over the weekend and am about to do some
more testing before my onsite this PM.



On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 01:50 -0400, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On 03/26/2010 11:05 PM, Rich Faulkner wrote:
> > Very interesting.  Many thanks for the head's up...
> 
> Recently, I got a machine that has an AMD/ATI chipset in it.  I had 
> Karmic on it and used the proprietary driver and was honestly quite 
> surprised at just how much faster it was.  Of course, I was using the 
> proprietary driver, and that didn't do any sort of blurring.
> 
> Currently, I am running Lucid.  The kernel has mode setting support, and 
> the display is fast.  The WiFi and the graphics actually work using free 
> software.  It's ironic, I think.  ATI chipsets and Linux used to be just 
> simply awful together.
> 
> I need to try a few more ATI graphics cards and make sure that this is a 
> trend and not something isolated, but assuming that it isn't isolated, 
> I'm going to have to say that I can't recommend NVIDIA to anybody 
> anymore.  They do perform differently for different things, but I have 
> had no hard lock-ups or screen corruption or problems with graphics or 
> 3D or any of that like I have had on and off with certain particular 
> NVIDIA chipsets.
> 
> Oh, and if I want to use a full-screen console or not boot up X for some 
> reason, I am greeted by a 200 column, 56 row virtual terminal.  I would 
> *kill* to have that on the servers I manage.  And switching 
> back-and-forth between the console framebuffer and X11 involves no mode 
> switching; it's completely transparent.  I love it.  It's stupid simple, 
> it stays the hell out of my way, it just works---and without the unknown 
> quantity of an undebuggable (unless you're a true wizard who speaks 
> binary anyway) binary blob.  Makes me happy.
> 
> 	--- Mike
>