* On Friday 01 July 2005 20:57, Justin Hart wrote: > To counter this argument, I would point out that I don't normally > purchase used 3D acceleration hardware, and that by the time these > cards are "old" they will also be "obsolete," meaning that you will > have sunk a good amount of money into hardware that didn't work > properly for you until it was outdated.
First of all, to avoid wrong assumptions: It's not the hardware that doesn't work properly, it's the proprietary software driving them. My experiences and my point of view is just the following: I don't care if my hardware is outdated or even "obsolete", as long as it works. I'm not even interested in squeezing out the last frame per second playing the most recent shooter of the year. Things I do care for example is the ability to suspend my systems, and to gracefully resume afterwards. Both cards have no problem in doing so, it's just the proprietary drivers that suck, be it ATI or nVidia. As an addition, I like Xorg's eyecandy, and even the most "obsolete" card here has enough power to support it, it's just the drivers that suck, be it ATI or nVidia. I know that nVidia's drivers may work fine with brand new cards in this context, but they won't ever support the things I'm after using my Geforce2 GTS - it's "legacy". I'm pretty sure my ATI FireGL T2 will do so sooner or later, just because there's much more information available to the developers. They can work on it if ATI won't. With nVidia, you're doomed. At this very moment, none of both manufacturers can give me the things which are on top of my priorities, so I'm still going with unaccelerated open source drivers in both cases. I just got used to wait... ;-) But while nVidia is forcing me to buy new hardware if I want to keep up with features my card would still be able to support, ATI isn't. Free software is about choice - so why would I want to have my freedom of choice denied by a hardware manufacturer? It's nVidia who want me to spent money in my specific case. As ATI is offering delayed informations about it's hardware, it's no big surprise that Zack Rusin's first implementation of EXA[1], a new and resource friendly acceleration architecture for Xorg, is done within the r200 open source drivers for ATI cards. So is it good or bad thing buying ATI cards for Linux? What drives open source development? I'm still pretty sure there's no clear "yes" or "no" suitable for all situations and intentions. It's just the old "ATI sucks, nVidia rocks" rant that gets on my nerves. Things ain't that simple, but I can see and understand your point - it just differs from mine. ;-) Regards, Jens Footnotes: [1] http://dot.kde.org/1119948104/ -- Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. -- Oscar Wilde -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
