ATI or Nvidia?

Cyber Maid · 02-08-2005, 07:35 PM

Hello,

I just bought a ATI Radeon 9550 two weeks ago, and it's nothing but a pain in the ass.
It won't display xv on a secondary screen...so no watching dvd's on my TV screen, or very slow and crappy with xvidix.
And i can't seem to get the 3D accelerator working no matter what i try.
I wanna play UT again >_>

I've been looking all over for solutions but there are none that really work.
Even my Geforce 4 worked better...i wish i didn't sell it already.

Anyways...i wanna buy a new one and i'm thinking of going Nvidia again.
Any suggestions which card i should buy?

triaydev · 02-08-2005, 09:08 PM

Well I had the same problem whit a Radeon 9200 based video board. I searched here and what people here told me is that ATI GPUs are barely supported. Of course u can get good resolution and color depth but HW acceleration never worked and configure the tv-out is VERY messy. I ended up buying a nVidia GeForce 4000 board. If you still want to get a chance on ATI, there's this project on sourceforge http://gatos.sourceforge.net intended to make ATI chips work under linux and here's the ATI support page for linux http://www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html

Good luck

reddazz · 02-09-2005, 04:13 AM

If you want to remain sane, buy an Nvidia based graphics card and install the latest official nvidia drivers for Linux

the-copy · 02-09-2005, 08:24 AM

The drivers from ati sucks. It is only avaliable (spell?) in rpm-packages, but you can make them to .tgz by using the rpm2tgz command. Then you'll have to install it, build the drivers (after you have found out that you must ) (that only works in >2.6.0), then install them, then configure it by fglrxconfig, then rename the XF86Config-4 file to xorg.conf (if u use it) and then change the Keyboard driver to kbd. After that, you will notice that the driver don't work, and get mad, it took me one time 1h to get it working, and another time 1 week.

To install Nvidia:

./driver.run
enter enter enter enter (almost)

bobbens · 02-09-2005, 09:55 AM

I got my ati card (radeon 9600) working without too many problems. Just gotta know what you're doing. I can play games and stuff pretty well, just has a issue with nwn and kernel agpgart. The multiple monitor setup is hard to get, so i just have it in clone mode, good enough for me, but i think the nvidia drivers have better feature support (multiple monitors, more support in programs, etc...), but hey, at least i can play half-life 2. All this with a debian system (uses XFree86), a bit tougher on x.org i think.

Cyber Maid · 02-09-2005, 11:17 AM

Thanks for replying guys!

I just finished installing my new Asus V9570 TD / Geforce FX5700, got it like 2 hours ago :P
This card is much better...good tv-out with xv and 3D is not a point as well.
Working like a dream!

I'm gonna stick to Nvidia...already got a buyer for my Radeon, good riddens

KimVette · 02-09-2005, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by the-copy
The drivers from ati sucks.

That, friends, is putting it extremely politely. I'd have inserted a good number of explitives in the above statement.

bobbens · 02-10-2005, 01:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by KimVette
That, friends, is putting it extremely politely. I'd have inserted a good number of explitives in the above statement.

Hey, at least they "work" well enough to get opengl at ok framerates, but still they're behind on nvidia.

rylan76 · 02-10-2005, 02:10 AM

Go Nvidia NOW. My new Winfast A350TDH FX5900 works like a charm. RedHat 9 installed perfectly, using VESA to run the X server. I then downloaded the excellent Nvidia Linux driver for X, changed the "vesa" line in the xconfig to "nvidia" like so:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "LeadTek"
BoardName "Winfast A350"
VideoRam 131072
EndSection

and Bob has been my uncle ever since. I had similar excellent experiences in X with my previous Nvidia board, which also was a GeForce 4 MX440 based Leadtek card.

Go back to Nvidia, IMHO....