On Miércoles, 20 de Octubre de 2010 16:23:55 Roger Oberholtzer escribió:
I am investigating getting a new laptop. For the most part I know what I should expect to work. Unfortunately, the graphics chip seems to be the tricky part.
It seems to me that Nvidia is getting less and less common in laptops. At least the ones generally available here in Sweden. Like HP, Sony, and the like.
All the laptops that I come across that have all the features I want (reasonable screen size, non-Sherpa weight, nice keyboard) seem to have ATI rather than Nvidia chipsets. Like Radeon HD 5850 or 5860.
I know that there has been progress on the ATI driver front. My last use of an ATI card (a firewire GL that was not supported by the ATI driver), as well as general rumbling by other users, indicates that I should steer clear of ATI chips. Is this still the case? It is obviously a YMMV question. But how are others faring with similar ATI chipsets?
I don't want a religious war. I know I will probably get one. But a simple "this ATI chipset works/fails for me with version X of the ATI driver" would be greatly appreciated.
My laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 (M92 chipset) and it works fine with openSUSE 11.3, KDE 4.5.2 and the Catalyst 10.9 driver. Desktop effects are enabled out-of-the-box thanks to the open source driver (radeonhd I think). Nevertheless, if you want to play games you have to use the proprietary one to get more FPS (that could change in the future). I also have to say that it's not a 100% smooth experience like with any other graphics card driver. BTW, take a look at http://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Laptops ;-) Greetings -- Javier Llorente