Best card for under $100

[blackiwid]

its pretty easy ^^. If you dont care about the openess of drivers and dont want features like kms, and never want to try alpha or beta versions of distries or try some new kernels which just gut released or are just in release candidate state, and are willing to believe in nvidia that they never let you in a unusable state than go with nvidia. Ahh and if you are happy to somehow modify your distry in the first place (in ubuntu klick on one button and reboot, in other distries maybe type some stuff in the console) so than go with nvidia,


But if you dont want all that and you want maybe support from kernel hackers for bugs for your stuff, you should go with amd. (they dont accept bug reports with tainted kernels (with nvidia blob loaded)

another question does he really need that cpu power? ^^ Else maybe Llano would be an alternative, but I think because he bought it it makes no sense to change it back, here in germany we can send stuff we bought over the internet back without giving a reason till 2 weeks after we got it

[Kano]

Do you think it is reasonable to completely forget about nouveau? Usually somebody would use the nvidia binary for best performance, but basically if you are an oss fan you can certainly use nouveau - and those drivers are not the slowest if the gpu clock is set to highest speed, maybe even better than radeon. Thats nothing thats only for amd cards, there you are just forced for much more cards to use oss drivers, you dont have got the choice anymore. Usually i would recommend to buy the cheapest card possible if you want to use oss drivers but well if you only play games with win maybe something faster would be also a good idea.

[blackiwid]

I don't know about the performance features and stability of the nouvou drivers and which cards are supported and which not, but I would be very sad if they would be better or even nearly at the same state the radeon drivers are.

Because the opensource community would basicly say, we piss on companys that give us free specs and drivers and help the concurent company that blocks free drivers to sell more cards. Each company who would give theyr specs and drivers out for free would be stupid because they just suffer from them.

So hopefully this devs at least not try to make them as good as the radeon drivers or they really do damage for linux on the long run. If somebody would ask me I would boykott nvidia with drivers, so they who like the blobs and dont care buy nvidia cards, the people who do care and dont want the practical limitations of this development process go for ati.

If only blobs are good and no problem and people dont care about it, good, but why making then against of the will of nvidia for them free drivers so that they sell more grafic cards.


Sorry for the bad english, but I think its understandable enough? ^^

[Kano]

Well there are no open specs, thats correct. But as reverse engineered driver it is really good. Maybe you should try it before you complain so much.

[blackiwid]

So but my basic statement is true, if you care for openess or freedom or stuff go for amd if you dont care go for nvidia.

I am thankful, and not selfish, so I am very thankful for amd for giving support to linux and I don´t reward companys that are unsocial.

So if you say the nouvou drivers are good, so I have to believe you but you did not say is it better or not that good like the radeon drivers?

I surely don´t buy a nvidia card support this company just to look at this nouvou driver.

[yogi_berra]

I must have missed the headline of the year. Care to point me to how to configure either blob for a KMS framebuffer console?

add vga=ask to your boot paramaters, pick the resolution of your monitor, boot into it, add that to your grub.conf, et voilà, instant resource wasting framebuffer on boot.

[Kano]

Thats incorrect for newer grub versions. The correct way is:

grep -q ^GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX /etc/default/grub||(echo GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub;update-grub)

You should use su/sudo -i before depending on your os.

[curaga]

add vga=ask to your boot paramaters, pick the resolution of your monitor, boot into it, add that to your grub.conf, et voilà, instant resource wasting framebuffer on boot.

4/10 for making me respond. vesafb != KMS fb.

[Kano]

Btw. vesafb is disabled in current U kernels, so vga=xxx overrides will not work. You can use uvesafb (needs v86d in initrd and special override options, no vga=xxx) or if your system is new enough efifb will work too (just with the correct grub override).

[yogi_berra]

4/10 for making me respond. vesafb != KMS fb.

The end result is exactly the same, chief.

@ Kano - sane distributions aren't using Grub 2.