Recommended laptop for FC5, was: glxgears

Lamont R. Peterson lamont at gurulabs.com
Wed Mar 1 01:43:28 UTC 2006


On Tuesday 28 February 2006 05:57pm, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 16:52 -0800, alan wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Louis E Garcia II wrote:
> > > Where is glxgears in FC54T3? I just put my radeon 9250 in abgmode 8 and
> > > think it is actually slower.
> >
> > glx-utils
> >
> > I have stopped using ati due to support issues.  nVIDIA may have closed
> > source drivers, but they have at least supported everything with them.
> > (ATI's support with their closed source driver depends on picking the
> > right card.)
>
> So if I was buying a new laptop sometime soonish, what chipset is best
> for all this new accelerated X stuff?

Personally, I've never liked nVidia.  Partly, that's because of how horribly 
sucky and unstable the first 4 or 5 generations of each chip were (though, 
only the first one really has any serious issues anymore, if even that).  Too 
many of my friends who had nVidia based cards experienced lots of system 
lockups and crashes when running games (even/especially on Windows) and 
simply switching to some other video card they wouldn't have any of those 
problems at all.  Yes, I know nVidia is much better than they used to be, but 
something about them still just rubs me the wrong way a little.  What can I 
say, I don't really like them.

I like Matrox, but they really don't support Linux like they used to.  Still, 
their cards are rock solid and run quite well.  I have lots of success with 
3D acceleration of those (I don't have any Parhelia level stuff, for which 
there is no 3D acceleration support that I am aware of).

I like ATI for notebooks, especially.  Good performance, relatively low power 
consumption and they are pretty well supported, even by ATI even for Linux.

But, nVidia's closed source drivers do seem to have the most complete 
accelerated 3D support of all the manufacturers.  I am considering getting an 
nVidia card for a game system for my wife (we play WoW).

Oh, how I would love to see the video card makers build open source drivers.  
Sigh.  I'll keep dreaming.

> ati seems to not care about Linux, and I've heard bad things about
> nvidia. I don't do games, so 3D isn't that important.

Well, if you don't care about 3D, then take your pick.  It really doesn't 
matter.  :)

Almost all cards are very nicely & completely support 2D and pretty much every 
card made today has pretty much equal 2D performance.  Card makers 
distinguish themselves on 3D.

However, with FC5, there are some cool things that can be done for "normal" 
apps if you have 3D acceleration.  Some new "eye-candy" items and such.

> Thanks for any help,

HTH, even though it doesn't look that helpful to me.
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: F98C E31A 5C4C 834A BCAB  8CB3 F980 6C97 DC0D D409
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