Video Drivers

[Michael Butash]

I use ati just fine with steam, well at least games that support it. 
You'll need 13.1 drivers with it, but I've played half life stretched 
across 6 displays without issue.  Something no nvidia card will (ever) 
seemingly do.  I can't say the same for postal 2 though quite yet, but 
it *sorta* works with bugs unable to play, so not quite a given 
universal for linux games yet, ymmv.

Video playback under ubuntu12.04 is still a bit odd at times 
(temperamental I'd say with totem, but works mostly) and plays back 
1080p and the nvidia.  The system is fast enough it could be cpu 
rendered and I don't notice as 1080p on a decent c2d was only about 20% 
anyways, this sandybridge is much faster.

I use nvidia in all my xbmc tv display servers still as vdpau has been 
defacto for smooth hd playback since the 9x00 cards for xbmc.

Worst part of amd drivers seem to be screen compositing interaction, and 
generally xorg itself.  When my card breaks, and if I'm playing any game 
with another gl-renderer (my case, an xp vm instance with 3d enabled 
vbox drivers wanting to use the gpu too), it'll freak out occasionally, 
and start an almost memory-leakish condition in the kernel.  I usually 
kill off compiz/unity switching to metacity (default anyways), and kill 
off vbox first before launching any game (usually means I'm in visio 
working anyways).  My box will generally crash somehow within a day or 
so if I forget and run both.  Another really odd things is I can usually 
tell, as something sorta "pops" on my system, including usually my md 
raid will break sync as a result, and can no longer gl render without a 
reboot.  Very odd...

I switched from nvidia as their multi-display tech is shite (no more 
than 2-3[recently] displays in a fb) to ati where I've been fairly happy 
lately with it's ability to render 6 displays in a giant framebuffer (up 
to 8-wide and/or high @1920), and with steam, put em to use for games, 
finally.

-mb


On 03/04/2013 04:52 PM, Nathan England wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm looking to incite a flame war. I was under the impression that the
> ATI graphics driver that is open-sourced was being developed by the
> community, not directly by AMD. Is it true that AMD is developing the
> driver itself?
>
> I want to buy a new video card that is capable of playing a few games I
> like to kill time with, probably in windows until Steam gets some more
> linux stuff, but I also want good support in my KDE environment.
>
> I have always stuck with Intel because it has awesome support in
> Linux... Now I need to choose between nVidia and AMD. Because of many
> comments and support for AMD I recently purchased a new AMD machine that
> I intend to use for my development server, but until I replace my
> workstation, I am using it for that. It has an AMD graphics built in
> Radeon HD 6530D. I have been pleasantly surprised by this card using the
> open source driver, but I'm wondering how it would work with the
> proprietary driver, and I'm a little scared to attempt to install it.
>
> If you were going to buy a new card today (sub-$100) what would you buy
> and why? I value your opinions, which are also more current than what
> Google is returning...
>
> I appreciate your thoughts!
>
> --
>
> Regards,
>
> Nathan England
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> NME Computer Services http://www.nmecs.com
>
> Nathan England (nathan at nmecs.com)
>
> Systems Administration / Web Application Development
>
> Information Security Consulting
>
> (480) 559.9681
>
>
>
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