LWN: Comments on "A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)"

Incompatibility List

daenzer — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:34:02 +0000

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)

anton — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 14:11:40 +0000

>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
drivers, but there are free 2D drivers for the R3xx line. I am
happily using an RV350 (Radeon 9600) with free drivers.

If you are interested in 3D performance and want to buy a 9250 or 9200
for that, make sure that you get one with a 128-bit memory interface
(a lot of 64-bit cards are now sold as 9250 (without the SE label)).

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

lacostej — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 22:02:49 +0000

There was a project to make a open source video card. Anyone is following this project? I have a quick look to the mailing list archives every quarter or so. But it's hard to know what will happen.

Incompatibility List

Duncan — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:37:04 +0000

Very cool! I knew of linuxcompatible.org, and various other compatibility
lists, but not of an /in/compatibility list. Now bookmarked!

Duncan

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

tialaramex — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:07:13 +0000

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.

Incompatibility List

davidw — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 06:23:01 +0000

Remember, folks, we have a community effort to keep track of stuff to avoid, located here:

http://www.leenooks.com

'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.

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

dlang — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:28:28 +0000

there's a huge difference between needing a firmware blob and binary-only drivers.

the firmware runs on the card in question, and if it was held in flash or ROM there would be no question about it. the firmware is dependant on the hardware details, but is completely independant of the OS.

the drivers are part of the OS and very sensitive to changes in that OS, as a result binary-only ones can't work reliably across different versions.

both of these are significant issues in their own way, but please do not mix them up

Speculation

dark — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 20:16:57 +0000

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.

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

zlynx — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 20:16:51 +0000

You're talking about the glue code that links the binary driver into the kernel for both nVidia and ATI right?

I'm not surprised if some nVidia glue code ends up in ATI's glue code. That code has to be open source at least far enough to be "GPL Compatible" so that it can go into a kernel module.

Of course, you can't see any of the code used inside the binary for either vendor.

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

cantsin — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 19:52:20 +0000

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)

jwb — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 18:16:15 +0000

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?

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

odie — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 18:09:18 +0000

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)

dark — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:46:04 +0000

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)

rknop — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:44:32 +0000

ATI *used to* provide information for developers to create free drivers.

NVIDIA never has.

As such, I tend to get Radeon 9200's nowadays, since that's the last card that had a free driver which still does everything else one wants (including 3D DRI acceleration).

I never have, and never will (if I can avoid it) buy an NVIDIA card until they change their policy on free drivers.

I'm not happy about ATI's current policies, but at least they once helped support free drivers.

I'm sad that the free driver issue is becoming more and more obfuscated as the availability of binary-only drivers is getting higher. This is true not just for video cards, but also for wireless cards. I even saw an ethernet card on a laptop a student bought that required a firmware blob to work. (We figured this out because the driver had moved out of core Debian in a recent release.)

What we REALLY need is a core clearinghouse of information for what hardware has truly free (not just zero-cost) drivers for Linux. This would be good for (a) people like me who care, and (b) to help raise general awareness that there even is such an issue.

Does such a place exist already? I know that last I checked, it was a nightmare to try and figure out what wireless card I ought to buy if I ever needed a new one.

-Rob

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

danielpf — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:18:14 +0000

Yes, I agree, so why not share our experience?

I have installed dozen of ATI or NVIDIA cards, and consistently the
NVIDIA support for Linux is much better than ATI's. Looking
through the code that ATI provides gives the bizare impression
that they don't even try to compile once the driver, since the
code may contain C errors, or contains calls for kernel 2.4
functions while the code is intended for kernel 2.6.

Interestingly the ATI provided code inludes NVIDIA code.

Since this kind of things is not limited to a single driver release,
the impression is that ATI doesn't care producing low
quality drivers for Linux. As a result I will never buy again an
ATI card.

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

odie — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:15:42 +0000

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.

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

leandro — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 16:38:04 +0000

I'm disappointed there was no discussion of getting free drivers.