On Tuesday 02 Oct 2001 6:02 am, J.Drews wrote:
On Monday 01 October 2001 10:36 pm, you wrote:
What bothers me about Nvidia is their not too swift support in terms of drivers, (historically), and fixes for bugs...
Exactly! I allowed myself to be strung along by nVIDIA for 18 months. I bet they have one guy at nVIDIA working on those damn drivers. The lmore experienced inux users can get them to work but for newcomers it's just hell. Go look at nVIDIA's instructions for installing the kernel patch. In the last two hours there were posts about the nVIDIA drivers. nVIDIA isn't a graphics card chipset, it's a disease people should recover from.
I think you ought to give nVidia a little more credit, drivers are not the easiest thing to write when you don't know how a board maufacturer is going use the chipset. The best they can do is make it work for their reference board. IMHO It is the responsibility of the board maufacturers to get of their ass and write their version of the linux drivers if their board has a problem with them.
So, what would you and others recommend?
Well I switched from my Diamond Viper 770D (nVIDIA TNT2) to a 64 Mb ATI Radeon card. This is 3D card. I decided to do that after reading on ATI's web site that they make the details of their cards available to XFree86.org. I am sure there are other good card manufacturers too. I have only ever heard bad things about the Diamond video cards, a company I used to work for bought a couple of Dell PCs with the Diamond Viper cards and had a hell of a load of problems with them. Personally speaking you are better sticking with one of the main three suppliers of nVidia based cards : Hercules, Elsa, and Creative.
The problem with nVidia based cards is not the chipset, it is some of the so called tweaks that some manufcturers put into their versions of the nVidia reference board design. BTW A colleaue of mine bought an ATI Radeon card and did not think much of it. Also, it is rumoured that ATI had one or two problems themselves with their Windoze drivers. Anyway, you pays your money and takes your choice, the Creative nVidia cards have always worked for me and I would recomend them to anyone. -- Roger L.S. Griffiths, BSc (Hons) Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice) - Albert Einstein