ATi graphics cards

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> and i'm one from the opposide ;)
> unless you're not a hardcore-gamer, ati cards are much more reliable
> than nvidia cards.

What problems do the Nvidia cards have ? Do the fall apart... or catch
fire when the cooling fan fails ?! ;-)

> and if i look through the list-archives here, 
> theres much more people having trouble with
> nvidia-drivers than the ati users.

True ! But, may this is a simple statistic problem, that is, maybe 90%
of people do use nvidia cards, not ati, so obviously, you get 10 times
more posts about nvidia cards than ati...
In the same way, I keep seeing problems with Firefox and OpenOffice
despite everybody praising them. I use Gnumeric and Abiword and Galeon,
have zero problems with them, don't see any complaint about them on the
list, yet people will tell me they are crap compared to FF and OO. Go
figure. But I do realise that this because most people use OO and FF are
the Ubuntu default applications, and are more famous/popular to start
with, than the others.


> and as far as i understand it, is ati not that bad in supporting the
> os-community by delivering specs to build proper open source drivers.

WOW ! Can't believe it. If this is true, how comes we still have not
proper open source drivers, that compete with the closed source Nvidia
ones, minus the problems ? How come every linux user doesn't buy Ati
instead of Nvidia ? :-/
Well maybe we are precisely waiting for the community to write said
drivers... I hope it won't take too long then.
Also, XGI recently decided to fully the specs of their chips. So that
makes 2 brands that are Linux friendly.... once we have written drivers
for them. Also, there is this "Open Graphics" project, which should
start seeing the day of light early next year....can't wait.

> unless you're not in the need for neglecting your life and playing doom3
> all day long, theres no other reason than personal flavour to go nvidia.

I agree. However, although I enjoy only one game (X-Plane) and I play
about only 15 minutes per day, I still want to get the best out of my
card, since X-Plane really never has enough 3D performance.
My current on-board Geforce2 MX 32MB gives about 450FPS with "glxgears",
pathetic in X-Plane. I tried a friends Geforce4 64MB... about twice as
fast (850FPS), yet the graphics in X-Plane are not that much better.
I don't know how much modern fanless (I value silence...) cards can
score (I welcome figures :-), but I would hate to spend 100 Euros on a
"Linux friendly" card and get say 2500 FPS instead of say 5000FPS,
because of crappy drivers...
However, of course, and to go in your direction, I am happy to "lose"
between 5 to 10% of maximum FPS, say get 4500FPS instead of 5000, if
that gives me a super stable system, rather than a Nvidia driver that
may give me 99,5% of the cards capacity, but also give me random
hardlocks, seg fault or screen corruption. (current situation on my
machine ie :-/ )

So, I will stick with my ancient GeForce2 for a year or two... until XGI
and ATI and OpenGraphics card are popular, affordable, and enjoy top
quality open source drivers...

--
Vince