This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time. The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far from perfect, and apparently not getting better. I've had a couple of crashes and corruption issues with them just for window compositing. Meanwhile, the open source AMD drivers have been making massive improvements.
The proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all.
Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really aren't a good replacement at all.
I bought an AMD card 2 years ago, a mid-range one, and it was a headache. Their open source driver didn't support my card and it had a ton of known bugs.
I had to resort to their proprietary driver and i had a lot of trouble setting up a basic dual screen set up.
Although I initially bought AMD to support them for their open source efforts, turns out it was more of a PR stunt than anything else. I'm an open source guy, but my time is more valuable than wasting it trying to set up a second screen!
There's an open-source 3D driver making massive improvements for nvidia too called Nouveau.
I wouldn't get ATi with Linux, it's all nvidia straight across for me. They have excellent driver support for Linux and I strongly like it. AMD's drivers still don't support X Server -1. Yeah, there's open-source drivers out there that work OK, but they still don't approach the performance of the proprietary ones. There are also a lot of applications that are buggy with Catalyst Linux.
Linux users are still much better off with nvidia for high-performance graphics. Intel is nice and cool and provides good support but their GPUs are exclusively low-end, which is fine for low-end users, but not fine for gamers et al.
Hmm. These days I don't use the 3D acceleration for anything but window compositing. I got the impression that for that the AMD drivers are pretty stable? Might see if I can borrow an AMD card from someone and test it out before I spend money.
Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.
I have a motherboard with onboard ATI HD4200 graphics and run the latest KDE4, and the open source AMD drivers are plenty fine to manage all kinds of shiny effects. They even manage some simpler 3D stuff without problem. I've never had any problems with the stability of the drivers either.
That's an excellent data point, thank you. I was actually looking at motherboards with that chip, and I too am a KDE 4 user. One more question: do standby/hibernation work well?
Suspend to RAM works perfectly. Suspend to disk works when I call it from the command line, but not when I select it from the shutdown menu in KDE. So I imagine it can be made to work by someone willing to look into it.
