On May 29, 2004 09:34 pm, you wrote:

On Sun, 2004-05-30 at 06:31, Sergei Klink wrote:

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On May 28, 2004 11:22 pm, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:

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Word to the Wise... Get Nvidia.

Reasons:

1) Ati Driver support for linux even in 2.4 series kernels and 32bit is bad. You will get artifacting in alot of applications. (i.e celestia) and Even in games like UT2004. WineX emulation support is also alot better with Nvidia.

Btw, would be also nice to hear from anyone who tried the latest ATI drivers, which supposedly fix issues with winex.

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Nvidia drivers have all the functionality of the windows counterparts and have very good performance. With very few errors and a very complete opengl implementation

2) Currently ati's drivers don't support 2.6 kernels it is possible to get them working with significant effort.

Nvidia: Currently support 2.6 kernels under 32bit right from the nvidia page.

Why's that? ATI's 32bit drivers had support for 2.5/2.6 kernels for quite a while, even the -test ones, although it wasn't updated quickly enough until 2.6.0 release(I was using it for a while without problems until I bought my amd64 box). IIRC I still wasn't able to use nvidia's drivers under 2.6 without patches from minion.de

ATI's drivers are terrible under 2.6 I've just spent a frustrating weekend of debuging the latest (3.9.0) to compile and work on a 2.6.x fedora core... It's not fun. They have screwed up big time...

I suspect something very much Fedora related(if it would've been the same for XFree86). I used those in both Debian(sarge) and SuSE(9.0) with 2.6 without any problems. I wonder how'd you be debugging those, btw? :)

Have a look: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33757007

Besides, you're talking about xorg and not xfree86 support here as well. I'd really not expect them to take xorg seriously until it appears as the default in at least one more popular distro.

rage3d forums are really good on info about the linux ati drivers...

As for nvidia not working... if you are using suse 9.1 kernel + yast online update... you should have no problems...

Same thing as getting patches from minion.de :P I didn't check if there's a SuSE rpm for fglrx as there was for 9.0, though.

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3) ATI do not support 64bit in either 2.4 or 2.6 Forget about running accelerated ATI drivers on a 64bit platform

I wouldn't say "forget", there are DRI drivers(and btw, they support 32bit apps unlike nvidia's drivers) for up to Radeon 9200, but they won't be much use for most games.

??? I've had no trouble running 32bit apps with nvidia's 64bit drivers... I use winex all the time. And mplayer compiled for 32bit.

You're probably using the 32bit Mesa library still hanging around the system(which is what you'd be using with DRI drivers). It does work in the simplest cases, but, for example, running ET with it yields a lot of black textures where they shouldn't be as well as other weirdness(I mean, not just small artifacts, it's completely unplayable). In fact, I'm amazed it works at all. If you don't believe me, download the installer and see that the only library included is 64bit(or just poke around the site). Even the latest nvidia release doesn't support 32bit opengl, unless you take the libs from the 32bit release and set a variable which disables direct rendering(forgot what it was), which disables a lot of extensions, and is _very_ unstable(slower, too, obviously).

Yah the opensource dri drivers are messed up tho... Rendering is all wrong in alot of apps.

Can't blame them, but at least ATI _was_(emphasis) one of the companies that actually provided some information about its video cards. Meaning that I can play ET on my amd64 box now :)

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Nvidia AMD64 support is good under 2.4 series (again working from the nvidia installer "Out of the box". 2.6 is still getting there but it does work. suse 9.1 support 64bit nvidia drivers on their 2.6 kernels "out of the box" using YAST online update. You can also patch nvidia installer for 2.6 64bit from minion.de.

Short answer get a nvidia if you want to run linux. ATI are years behind in their linux support.

IMHO they both have terrible linux support. Last nvidia's driver release was in January, numerous issues discovered since then, and I don't see much of reaction from their side. 32bit emulation is another thing... ATI's drivers are (IMHO) OK for 32bit, and I certainly had better experience with them as far as stability goes(and working on both console and X), if you don't mind 24bit colour as the only option, but I still don't understand where are the 64bit drivers. Either they want to test them internally(and have the same set of functionality) before releasing, or they just decided to ignore us for a while, using existing DRI drivers as an excuse...

I agree they both don't have GREAT linux driver support. But NVIDIA is noticeably in front of the game compared to ATI.

Don't know. Just because they tend to have more opengl extensions working doesn't necessarily put them ahead. In fact, the problems when working on the console(framebuffer especially) is enough to spoil any of the greatest features they might have over ATI for me. On the other hand, 24bit only colour support and rendering problems for ATI set them back just as well. Of course, none of the above is of any concern to people like recent Windoze converts, so apparently nobody causes enough noise for the companies to start doing anything about them. IMHO it's not even satisfactory for either(and AFAIK these are about the only choices we have for relatively low-cost cards), and comparing them at this low level is just useless.

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Personally I would wait untill the nv 6800's come out in another couple of week.. (if you have the money =-). The 5200's are good if your on a budget. And if you can't wait and have money the 5950's

Latest nvidia release added support =-PPPP

5950? Yes. 6800? No. I've just grepped through ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-5336/README, and found no mention of 6800.

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I haven't seen 6800 on the list of supported cards, btw, and I wouldn't count on a new driver release in a few weeks, either. FX5200(from Asus) worked horribly slow(no, not software emulation, but still slower than I expected) for me(yes, I visited the forums), I don't know if I'd recommend it to anyone for anything gaming-related(I was more than satisfied with a Radeon 9000 performance, so I figured this would be about right, turned out it's way too far...). Video overlay worked in a very strange way, too - I'm still trying to find the cause, though(on my athlon1.2 machine), sometimes the colour is completely messed up, or the aspect ratio is changed slightly(in any player).

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are currently the best (Beating the radeon 9800 pro's currently available from ati (yes rx chips are comming... i know... but nvidia's nv6800 feature wise is alot better )

... and AFAICS neither of them will be supported in linux for a while.

See above

Same :) Unless there are some "unofficial" drivers, which I doubt.

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Hope this answers some of your questions...

On Sat, 2004-05-29 at 00:22, Markus Feilner wrote:

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Hello List, I am thinking about buying a AMD 64 System (Shuttle SN85G4 with an Athlon 64) and I am still searching for a Grafix CArd with 3D Support and good-qualitiy video rendering for 64bit Suse. I would prefer ATI cards, because i have had very good experience, but are there 64 bit drivers? If not, which cards can you recommend?

[The System is going to be a Multimedia Game/Cinema/TV Streaming Server (...someday) which I want to be based on VLAN CLient or similar.] --

I think all of those are currently much, much easier to be done in 32bit(especially games and cinema).