[ale] nvidia news

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/26/2010 11:05 PM, Rich Faulkner wrote:
> Very interesting.  Many thanks for the head's up...

Recently, I got a machine that has an AMD/ATI chipset in it.  I had 
Karmic on it and used the proprietary driver and was honestly quite 
surprised at just how much faster it was.  Of course, I was using the 
proprietary driver, and that didn't do any sort of blurring.

Currently, I am running Lucid.  The kernel has mode setting support, and 
the display is fast.  The WiFi and the graphics actually work using free 
software.  It's ironic, I think.  ATI chipsets and Linux used to be just 
simply awful together.

I need to try a few more ATI graphics cards and make sure that this is a 
trend and not something isolated, but assuming that it isn't isolated, 
I'm going to have to say that I can't recommend NVIDIA to anybody 
anymore.  They do perform differently for different things, but I have 
had no hard lock-ups or screen corruption or problems with graphics or 
3D or any of that like I have had on and off with certain particular 
NVIDIA chipsets.

Oh, and if I want to use a full-screen console or not boot up X for some 
reason, I am greeted by a 200 column, 56 row virtual terminal.  I would 
*kill* to have that on the servers I manage.  And switching 
back-and-forth between the console framebuffer and X11 involves no mode 
switching; it's completely transparent.  I love it.  It's stupid simple, 
it stays the hell out of my way, it just works---and without the unknown 
quantity of an undebuggable (unless you're a true wizard who speaks 
binary anyway) binary blob.  Makes me happy.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475