nvidia or ati ?

[Michael Peters]

On Tuesday, October 25, 2005, at 06:29AM, Rudolf Kastl <che666 at gmail.com> wrote:

>yeah it works but the performance is below acceptable for me, even
>with a rather fast cpu ;).
>
>2005/10/25, tlc <tlc at artemide.us>:
>> On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 15:14 +0200, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
>> > nvidia "nv"  driver doesnt provide any hw acceleration at all... go
>> > ahead and try tux racer with software rendering ;) its fun to watch.
>> > sure if you dont intend to run anything 3d it doesent matter...
>> >
>> > regards,
>> > Rudolf Kastl
>> It works fine for me even with the nv driver. And the nvidia driver is a
>> very easy to install.

I have to recommend against using the nvidia binary driver.
Sometimes it is good, sometimes it ain't so good.

For example - I was experiencing a crash (segfault) in grep and slowness in balsa.
When using nv.ko (the open source driver) - grep did not segfault and balsa was fine.

Your experiences may differ - but I finally said enough is enough and I no longer will use binary only video drivers. With Open Source video drivers, sometimes there are problems too - but at least the source to the driver is available for people to look at and determine how to proceed with a solution.

I do wish we had a modern video card with good 3D acceleration and an open source driver - I don't know of one, maybe one exists - fortunately for me, 3D hardware acceleration isn't something I need.

I think some of the onboard Intel cards have good open source 3D acceleration.
Probably not as good as NVidia is capable of, but better than nothing.