Re: Open Source Supported Graphics Cards

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 08:07:23AM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 12:49:02PM +0100, Alan Chandler wrote:
I am planning on building myself a new computer from scratch, probably based
on the new Intel Core 2 Duo chips, and am seeking opinions on the best
graphics chipset/card that I should use. Basic criteria are as follows

1) Must be open source driver (under linux)
2) Some 3D capability - but not necessarily the fastest, but expect to run
the following in the future (not particularly tried any of these yet)
- Flight Gear
- Blender
- KDE4

I currently am running a Gigabyte Radeon 9200 - which seems just about ideal
as it has the R200 chipset which seems fully supported. I would have liked
to carry it over to my new machine. Unfortunately
a) It has an AGP interface - newer motherboards seem to be PCI-E
b) My favoured Hardware Supplier (http://www.dabs.com) don't seem to stock
any graphics cards with this chipset as its far too old.

My current exploration around this subject doesn't seem to get a very clear
opinion. Most reviews seem to concentrate on ATI or Nvidia chipsets, with
the requirement that I would then have to choose the binary drivers from
these two manufactures. This is something I would like to avoid.

Looking for alternatives at the dri.sourceforge.net web site, the chipsets
with full support, mainly seem to be the older ones, with possibly Intel
and Matrox offerings. Not sure I understand the detail - but this seems to
mean a motherboard with an intel chipset, or get a Matrox G5500 separate
card. What are don't really know is will these be sufficiently performant
for the tasks I need it for.

What can this list advise?

Of the modern graphics chips, the Intel chips are the best supported in
open source as their complete drivers are in the Linux kernel and in X.
The other two choices, nVidia and ATi, both require proprietary drivers
to get any semblance of decent performance.

Last I heard, Intel had announced their intention to make their own
video drivers open source in order to have a competitive advantage over
nvidia and ATI, but they hadn't yet done it. I also heard that at that
time the Intel chips were available on motherboards, but not on plug-in
cards.

Has the situation changed?

-- hendrik


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