Tom's Hardware Reviews ATI and Nvidia on Linux 201
Beuno writes "I stumbled upon a GeForce vs Radeon review on Tom's Hardware, which seems normal enough. The big surprise is that it was actually a comparison of those two video cards on Linux (Fedora Core 5).
The review isn't as thorough as I would like, but it does review all aspects ranging from tools available, complexity of getting them to work and benchmarks on performance.
To me, this is a clear signs of Linux finally making a long expected breakthrough into common desktops."
Performance issues (Score:5, Interesting)
NWN, WoW and UT have all been slightly faster than the Windows version, and crashes have been less of a problem (ctrl-alt-f1, kill task, no need to reboot - which _is_ required for some reason under Windows as games seem to offer best performance off a fresh reboot... resource recovery problems in the DirectX subsystem maybe?)
On the other hand EVE runs slower, with more graphical artifacts. Yes I'm aware that this is because it doesn't play that nicely with WINE and the fact that it runs in a playable fashion is a small miracle. It is still the case that if you want the best performance then you have to play it on Windows, for now.
let them do a Notebook comparison and see ATI fall (Score:5, Interesting)
So don't trust ATI for Linux capabilities on notebooks.
Maybe Toms Hardware can do a notebook comparison since they've already done the desktop. I'm pretty sure that would expose this failure to far more than the few who already are aware of this. And just maybe, it'll get ATI to fix this.
LoB
Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found, on the same hardware, that GTA: Vice City runs *smoother* with higher graphics settings in Cedega on Linux than natively in Windows. That really surprised me.
Re:Compatibility... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cedega does cause a price problem, though. I would encourage everyone to use Cedega and wipe out their XP partitions so that games start being ported, but I can't really recommend it for the price alone. New Windows every 7 years: $200. Cedega: $5/mo = $120/year. Thus, Cedega is more expensive than Windows.
Wine is better for everything but games, though. While I would like to see something similar to the Point2Play interface, especially if I could get some nice sandboxing, it isn't really necessary. But, right now, Wine seems to have a better overall architecture than Cedega -- cleaner design -- and it does seem to support things that Cedega does not.
Sub $100 Video Card Recommendation? (Score:1, Interesting)
Thanks!
3D? Talk to me about 2D. (Score:3, Interesting)
Peter
Re:Compatibility... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:XGL (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you sure that the driver is unaccelerated? I thought that the open source drivers (both ATI and nVidia) were 2D-accelerated, but lacked 3D acceleration. I haven't had slow performance on the (2D) desktop for ages.