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What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS dri

What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS drivers?

simcop2387 14y ago
Currently that would be Intel if you want OS drivers. Along with supporting more of the OpenGL standard (i think in dev they're at 3.1 or 3.2 now from what i've heard, which beats most of the other drivers currently) they are also doing fairly well performance wise lately too from what i've seen benchmarked. They're really come a long way and kudos to them.
dmm 14y ago
The "radeon" driver supports everything up to the "Northern islands" series very well. Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for details. Support for the "Southern island" series should be coming soon. And AMD is working to make future driver releases coincide with the hw releases. The free drivers are still a little slower than the proprietary drivers but they have more features such as KMS. EDIT: To answer your question directly, the Radeon HD 6970 or 6990 are the fastest northern islands cards and are well supported by the radeon xorg driver. I don't know if the driver can use both of the gpus in the 6990 though. The southern island chips should be supported very soon though, which are the HD7750 - HD7970 .
- cuu508 14y ago
  radeon driver is OK on single head, but has broken power management on multi-head. Hot, noisy and power hungry. Ironically, faster card---bigger problems :-) [1]. Proprietary AMD driver used to have serious issues with gnome-shell, but sometime last year they finally got fixed. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981
- vacri 14y ago
  I made the mistake of not confirming the vid card in my new work PC and it's a southern island chipset (Pitcairn). I use two 1920x1200 monitors and the open-source drivers can do that with no hardware acceleration. But if I use the proprietary drivers... I am limited to a total resolution of 1920x1920. That's not a typo, that's the limit it gives me - a square resolution I've never heard of in my life. I am looking forward to the open-source support and it can't get here fast enough - running a compositing desktop puts the eight cores of the i7 at ~50% CPU :) (though I live mostly in terminals, so I don't feel it beyond a touch of UI sluggishness sometimes)
  - dmm 14y ago
    The proprietary drivers suck because AMD is focusing on the open source ones. Big changes are coming for the OS driver. They've been making vertical changes that don't break down into small releases well.
morsch 14y ago
Does most compatible imply open-source? The proprietary Nvidia drivers tend to support recent high-end hardware, and they're pretty good in terms of compatibility; as in everything works. Including xrandr, these days. Incidentally, I was shocked to find out that connecting three displays just worked on my current setup, not long ago this took hours of crazy old-school X server tweaking to maybe get it to work.

What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS drivers?

simcop2387 14y ago

Currently that would be Intel if you want OS drivers. Along with supporting more of the OpenGL standard (i think in dev they're at 3.1 or 3.2 now from what i've heard, which beats most of the other drivers currently) they are also doing fairly well performance wise lately too from what i've seen benchmarked. They're really come a long way and kudos to them.

dmm 14y ago

The "radeon" driver supports everything up to the "Northern islands" series very well. Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for details. Support for the "Southern island" series should be coming soon. And AMD is working to make future driver releases coincide with the hw releases. The free drivers are still a little slower than the proprietary drivers but they have more features such as KMS. EDIT: To answer your question directly, the Radeon HD 6970 or 6990 are the fastest northern islands cards and are well supported by the radeon xorg driver. I don't know if the driver can use both of the gpus in the 6990 though. The southern island chips should be supported very soon though, which are the HD7750 - HD7970 .

cuu508 14y ago
radeon driver is OK on single head, but has broken power management on multi-head. Hot, noisy and power hungry. Ironically, faster card---bigger problems :-) [1]. Proprietary AMD driver used to have serious issues with gnome-shell, but sometime last year they finally got fixed. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981
vacri 14y ago
I made the mistake of not confirming the vid card in my new work PC and it's a southern island chipset (Pitcairn). I use two 1920x1200 monitors and the open-source drivers can do that with no hardware acceleration. But if I use the proprietary drivers... I am limited to a total resolution of 1920x1920. That's not a typo, that's the limit it gives me - a square resolution I've never heard of in my life. I am looking forward to the open-source support and it can't get here fast enough - running a compositing desktop puts the eight cores of the i7 at ~50% CPU :) (though I live mostly in terminals, so I don't feel it beyond a touch of UI sluggishness sometimes)
- dmm 14y ago
  The proprietary drivers suck because AMD is focusing on the open source ones. Big changes are coming for the OS driver. They've been making vertical changes that don't break down into small releases well.

morsch 14y ago

Does most compatible imply open-source? The proprietary Nvidia drivers tend to support recent high-end hardware, and they're pretty good in terms of compatibility; as in everything works. Including xrandr, these days. Incidentally, I was shocked to find out that connecting three displays just worked on my current setup, not long ago this took hours of crazy old-school X server tweaking to maybe get it to work.