[COLUG] Nvidia and ATI

[richard hornsby]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Chris Clonch <chris at theclonchs.com> wrote:
> I have a GeForce 7600GT that also works great with the nivida driver in
> Gentoo. nv works but you can hang it up when it comes to anything 3D.  From
> my experiences Nvidia has always be a cake walk compared to ATI.

I have a GeForce 8800GTS and it seems to work fine with the
proprietary (I know, I know) drivers in Ubuntu.  I don't remember if
I've tried turning on the Compix stuff or not.  For the most part I've
had a pretty good experience getting Nvidia cards to work in linux
(Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc), but ATI has been hit-or-miss --
mostly miss.

> I'm wondering though if I should recant my long-standing recommendation for
> Nvidia if ATI is working that closely with the OSS community.  I had hoped
> that would be the case when AMD purchased them as they've always seem to
> play nicely with OSS.

Wondering the same thing myself.  My experience with ATI has been
nothing short of a pain in the ass.  In fact, I have two ATI devices
right now (purchased a little over a year ago - one is a PCI
tuner/capture card and the other is a USB tuner) which are both
completely useless even in Windows because I can't make heads or tails
of the damned ATI+AMD website to find the right combination of
files/drivers.  The drivers off the shipped CD never worked right.
When I first bought the units it took a few hours of installing and
uninstalling half a dozen different files in various sequences to get
the PCI card to work right.  I don't specifically remember about the
USB version, but it wasn't much easier, IIRC.  Didn't make me a very
happy ATI customer then, and certainly not after trying to get them
both working again a few days ago.

I may give them a call tonight just for kicks and see if they can
provide any clues, maybe they'll change my mind?

-rj

(I have both devices because the USB version is "portable" and
ostensibly easier to deal with, but the response rate using an Xbox as
a video source was too slow.)