The non-evil graphics card

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 05:07:05PM +1000, Christopher Halse Rogers wrote:
> On 6/25/08, Markus Hitter <mah at jump-ing.de> wrote:
> >  probably some of you already read that statement of kernel developers
> >  about the opening of graphics drivers: <https://
> >  www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Kernel_Driver_Statement>
> >
> >  Currently I'm using Intel's integrated graphics (G965, G31), but I'm
> >  about to upgrade to a "real" graphics card.
> >
> >  Which vendor should I prefer (or stay with the G31) in order to
> >  support proper open source graphics drivers? Is there a
> >  contraindication if I want to use CUDA-like technologies (I'm doing
> >  FEA, CFD) ?
> >
> For high-performance graphics cards you're pretty much limited to ATI
> or nVidia.  This makes the choice nice and easy: ATI/AMD have released
> specs, and employ at least one Xorg developer.  nVidia have done
> neither, and (unsurprisingly) haven't responded to nouveau's
> request(s) for documentation.

As a slight correction, actually Aaron Plattner, the current maintainer
of the open source -nv driver, has been employed by nVidia for a while
now.  (I couldn't say whether he has other duties at nVidia besides
maintain -nv or if it is his full time job.)

But I would concur that -ati seems to be a good bit further along than
-nv at present.


In fact, while -ati still has a ways to go before it's a suitably
complete replacement for -fglrx, it's been making such good progress
that I think we can reasonably foresee a day when we start talking about
moving -fglrx out of main over to multiverse or something.

Bryce