Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:56:10 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:56:10 -0400 Received: from mail.eskimo.com ([204.122.16.4]:26374 "EHLO mail.eskimo.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:56:08 -0400 Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 17:00:57 -0700 To: Michael Clark Cc: felix.seeger@gmx.de, "David S. Miller" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: System very unstable Message-ID: <20020929000056.GB19765@eskimo.com> References: <200209281155.32668.felix.seeger@gmx.de> <20020928.025900.58828001.davem@redhat.com> <200209281233.21897.felix.seeger@gmx.de> <20020928.033510.40857147.davem@redhat.com> <3D958EF5.7080300@metaparadigm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3D958EF5.7080300@metaparadigm.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i From: Elladan Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2876 Lines: 57 On Sat, Sep 28, 2002 at 07:13:57PM +0800, Michael Clark wrote: > On 09/28/02 18:35, David S. Miller wrote: > > From: Felix Seeger > > Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 12:33:21 +0200 > > > > What card is good (performance for games and > > a acceptable licenze for kernel developers)? > > > >ATI Radeon is pretty fast and all except the very latest chips have > >opensource drivers. > > Radeon 7500 is currently the fastest board with an opensource > driver that supports 3D. 8500 XFree support is currently 2D only, > although apparently work on the opensource GL driver is underway. Unfortunately, in my experience the open source Radeon 7500 drivers are so unstable as to be basically unusable. Plus, they seem to still be basically incompatible with a lot of 3d software. I tried to get them to work for about 3 months this year, but finally gave up when it became clear that I'd need to buy another computer, put the Radeon in it, and start debugging the Radeon driver myself to get it working (lest you get the wrong impression, I mean here that I'd have to do it myself because other people seemed to be seeing them crash somewhat less often than I did, thus I had the best repro. Plus, to get particular software to work, I'd have to trace it myself since other people wouldn't have it) Which would mean, I'd still need to buy a graphics card to use in the meantime for my real machine. Not being able to justify the expense of a new, identical computer, I decided to simply buy the graphics card and forego debugging the Radeon for the time being. I know, I'm a wuss. The only reasonable option seemed to be to replace it with an NVidia card, which has turned out to be about five orders of magnitude more stable than the Radeon was even with the horrible closed-source NVidia drivers. (The MTBF for the Radeon was about 12 seconds, for the NVidia, it seems to be about 3 days) On the other hand, my old Matrox G400 card had stable open source drivers which didn't appear to crash at all, so if stability is most important, I'd say go with one of those. Unfortunately, the card itself is rather slow. (Though strangely enough, in realistic tests, it was pretty much equal or better than the Radeon... For the short time the Radeon could go without hard-locking the computer, that is. This was partly because the rendering quality was so much better, the Radeon had to be run in 32 bit mode to compare with 16-bit rendering on the Matrox in terms of output.) If you need to avoid NVidia, I'd say go for a Matrox G400, or maybe some sort of older Radeon which might be more stable. -J - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/