Re: 3D and Laptop

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Dennis Payne wrote:
> 
> > To quote someone off Linuxtoday earlier this week "...3D doesn't work for
> > Radeon 8500 cards, and the 7500 series 3D is an abomination."
> 
> > These days, the chances are that if you want decent 3D you're after a
> > machine with an NVidia card or you're in trouble (of course, UMMV, UNWADA)
> 
> I don't have any problem with binary-only software but I dislike secret
> protocols, file formats and hardware specs.  As such I'd rather stick
> to Radeon 7500.  I also don't have need of high end performance yet so
> I could live with slightly immature drivers.  In fact given the
> performance on my current system the jump in processor speed my be
> sufficient.

You are certainly right about that - but the difference in speed between
a recent nVidia chip (with nVidia's OpenGL drivers) and the Radeon (with
OpenSource Linux drivers) is pretty significant.  Also, many of the OpenGL
extensions of the Radeon are not accessible through the Linux drivers where
all of the GeForce features that you can reach via OpenGL are available
through their closed-source drivers.

So, if you don't need all of the speed and features then I'd certainly
recommend the Radeon for it's OpenSourced drivers - but if you *need* any
kind of cutting-edge performance then one has to wave goodbye to OpenSource
principles and suffer nVidia's binary-only drivers (which actually work
quite well in areas related to OpenGL programming - but which don't do so
well in areas of integration with the rest of the system - as evidenced
by the problems Mads has had with that nVidia-based laptop).

[My new GeForce-4 Ti 4600 is **amazing** - 128Mb of on-board memory...Mmmmm!]

  :-)

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