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Ten runlevelten@gmail.com wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I was, in my work machine, it's a Radeon 9200... which has nice, working, opensource drivers. The ATI binary drivers tend to be buggy and crashy and evil.
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Well, up to the 9200, it's mostly fine, the newer chipsets however require the binary ATI drivers (see above).
Buying a graphics card on an almost Dickensian budget, whilst wanting it to be an actual upgrade, I'm considering a low-end Radeon 9600 for 35 quid (after missing out on an nvidia Geforce 6600 for 50).
I've got an Nvidea GeForce 5700 Go card in the laptop, the binary drivers appear to work fairly well (they used to suck, and kill things, but they've been well behaved of late). Reasonable ish frame rate.
I'm not convinced of the card's brilliance, but I'm more wondering whether Radeons in general are usable + good yet - it would widen the breadth of choice a little :)
Well, there's someone working on an open source r320 driver, IIRC, which is the chipset used in the 9600 and upwards (fwicr) (all this is pulled out of my head, and may be innacurate, I've not looked recently).
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
Heh, haven't bought Doom 3 yet. I've got HL2, but I've broken my windows partition ;)
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
If by "grown up", you mean "has working binary drivers that give reasonable performance", then yes.
There are more expensive manufacturers, with nice opensource drivers, but they'd be very out of proce range for most mere mortals.
Cheers, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk