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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:15 UTC (Thu) by odie (guest, #738)In reply to: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) by leandro Parent article: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)
Yes. I just bought video card upgrades for a couple of PC's, and I opted for Radeon 9200 based on three things: The existence of good, free drivers, excellent 2D performance and the right connectors (DVI). None of these considerations are mentioned in the article. The free driver part was very important to me. My experience with binary drivers is that they are unreliable and hard to debug. Also, one of the main reasons for choosing Slackware GNU/Linux for these machines in the first place is that it is free, with all the benefits that brings. Why would I want to compromise that?
He does mention that Ati's drivers have a bad reputation, but nowhere mentions the fact that the free Radeon driver is very stable. Although it wasn't a consideration for me, one might mention that the free driver does support accelerated OpenGL. I cannot comment on the speed, though.
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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:46 UTC (Thu) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] So far I'm happiest with the Radeon 9000 Pro. It's faster than the 9200, despite the inferior version number :-) These cards still fairly easily available on auction sites, but are getting hard to buy from stores. I've seen versions with and without fan, so be sure you get to see a picture before you buy, if you care about fan noise.
The 9000/9200 seem to be the end of the line for freely supported cards, and I worry about what will happen when PCI-Express boards replace the AGP ones. In the worst case, we'll be stuck with integrated SVGA support, or ancient cards in the legacy PCI slots.
Fortunately, there _is_ work on an R300 driver for X.org, which is making progress despite the lack of specs. I've been quietly debating the ethics of buying such a card in order to help with the driver. I don't like funding hardware vendors that won't tell me how to use their products, but this case might be a useful exception.
(Note to danielpf below: *both* the drivers you mention are non-free ones. I don't care about what drivers ATI or Nvidia publish themselves; I want specs for *free* drivers in the kernel and in X! And so far, that means ATI is the lesser evil.)
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:09 UTC (Thu) by odie (guest, #738) [Link] The 9000 Pro is more expensive, and I couldn't justify spending extra money on faster OpenGL for these machines, when the cheaper cards already exceed the requirements.
The R300 project is of course a nice initiative, but without specifications from Ati, the developers will have a hard time making a quality driver. As the chip manufacturers make their own drivers instead of releasing specs, the free drivers suffer.
Matrox also used to provide specs, and the free Millenium II drivers are some of the best drivers out there. Now that Matrox develop their own drivers instead, they have still to produce a card that can beat the Millenium II at 2D speed in X.
The manufacturers are probably not lying when they say they can't release the specs due to NDA's with subcontractors. One has to wonder, though, how wise it is to base your entire business on technology you do not have the full rights to.
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:16 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I always wondered if this is an illusion. I have one machine with a Millenium II and it absolutely hauls ass. I have never done any x11 benchmarks, but that card just flies. Even painful operations like Mozilla's smooth scrolling are perfectly fast.
How come nobody else can touch this ancient card in 2D performance?
Speculation Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:16 UTC (Thu) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] I think the focus has shifted so much to 3D performance that 2D performance has been sacrificed, and these days it's just an emulation layer on top of the 3D logic.
Incompatibility List Posted Aug 19, 2005 6:23 UTC (Fri) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link] Remember, folks, we have a community effort to keep track of stuff to avoid, located here:
'Stuff to avoid' also means stuff that doesn't work with free drivers, although it's also fair to mention that, yeah, if you're desperate, there is a way to use it.
Incompatibility List Posted Aug 19, 2005 15:37 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Very cool! I knew of linuxcompatible.org, and various other compatibilitylists, but not of an /in/compatibility list. Now bookmarked! Duncan
Incompatibility List Posted Sep 4, 2005 16:34 UTC (Sun) by daenzer (✭ supporter ✭, #7050) [Link] The video page seems a little skewed, but I may be biased. But please at least remove verifiably incorrect statements like "ATI's Radeon driver doesn't work at all with 64 bit Linux Kernels". That hasn't been true since the beginning of this year.
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 19, 2005 10:07 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] In some ways we're actually catching up. This isn't through any particular technical wizardry, it's just that a few years ago each new year's cards meant a new feature set with huge changes (improvements) across the board, and now it means incremental upgrades...
ATI had big architectural changes in 2000 (R100, Radeon) in 2001 (R200 aka Radeon 8500) and 2002 (R300 aka Radeon 9700), then nothing but more pipelines, smaller die sizes and faster clock speeds until now in 2005. The R400 codename is essentially meaningless, at least as far as drivers go. We don't know for sure whether the new cards released this year are/ will be architecturally different, but even if they are it's the first change in almost 4 years.
My guess is that in five years time 3D cards will be worth no more fuss than soundcards. You'll probably be able to buy one that doesn't work with Linux, or provides binary only x86-64 drivers for kernel 2.6.25 only, but why would you? The cheap on-board 3D will be good enough for most people (and of course it will easily run the GPL'd Doom 3 engine that might be available by then) and the rest will buy from a reputable vendor with solid Free software drivers.
Meanwhile please support the R300 project if you have any chance to do so.
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:52 UTC (Thu) by cantsin (subscriber, #4420) [Link] Matrox has announced a PCI Express version of the Millennium G550 (chiefly a no-nonsense 2D-centric card with two DVI connectors and passive cooling) for September that allegedly will include free/open source Linux drivers.But I have no information whether those drivers will cover all relevant subsystems (kernel framebuffer and DRI, XFree86/X.org including multihead support and accelerated OpenGL/3D), whether they will be released under matching GPL and the X11 licenses, how difficult it will be to make those drivers work with current kernels and X servers, and when - if at all - those drivers will end up in the upstream kernel and Xorg distributions. If someone should know more about this than me, it would be greatly helpful if s/he could share the information here.
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Sep 3, 2005 14:11 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] >The 9000/9200 seem to be the end of the line for freely supported cards
The R2xx line (8500/9100/9000/9200/9250) is the only one with free 3D
If you are interested in 3D performance and want to buy a 9250 or 9200
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