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This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time. The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far from
by pmjordan 17y ago
This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time. The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far from perfect, and apparently not getting better. I've had a couple of crashes and corruption issues with them just for window compositing. Meanwhile, the open source AMD drivers have been making massive improvements.
- mbreese 17y agoDid you run the open source or closed drivers in the first place? Their proprietary drivers have always been better than the open source ones.
- pmjordan 17y agoThe proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all. Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really aren't a good replacement at all.
- duskwuff 17y agoYou mean ATI, surely?
- wmf 17y agoDid you notice that AMD bought ATI?
- cookiecaper 17y agoThere's an open-source 3D driver making massive improvements for nvidia too called Nouveau. I wouldn't get ATi with Linux, it's all nvidia straight across for me. They have excellent driver support for Linux and I strongly like it. AMD's drivers still don't support X Server -1. Yeah, there's open-source drivers out there that work OK, but they still don't approach the performance of the proprietary ones. There are also a lot of applications that are buggy with Catalyst Linux. Linux users are still much better off with nvidia for high-performance graphics. Intel is nice and cool and provides good support but their GPUs are exclusively low-end, which is fine for low-end users, but not fine for gamers et al.
- pmjordan 17y agoHmm. These days I don't use the 3D acceleration for anything but window compositing. I got the impression that for that the AMD drivers are pretty stable? Might see if I can borrow an AMD card from someone and test it out before I spend money. Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.
- dagw 17y agoI have a motherboard with onboard ATI HD4200 graphics and run the latest KDE4, and the open source AMD drivers are plenty fine to manage all kinds of shiny effects. They even manage some simpler 3D stuff without problem. I've never had any problems with the stability of the drivers either.
- pmjordan 17y agoThat's an excellent data point, thank you. I was actually looking at motherboards with that chip, and I too am a KDE 4 user. One more question: do standby/hibernation work well?
- scorpioxy 17y agoReally? Because i feel the opposite way. I bought an AMD card 2 years ago, a mid-range one, and it was a headache. Their open source driver didn't support my card and it had a ton of known bugs. I had to resort to their proprietary driver and i had a lot of trouble setting up a basic dual screen set up. Although I initially bought AMD to support them for their open source efforts, turns out it was more of a PR stunt than anything else. I'm an open source guy, but my time is more valuable than wasting it trying to set up a second screen!
- pmjordan 17y agoApparently, things have improved a lot in Linux AMD-land the last 2 years, whereas the nvidia drivers have stagnated.