Re: ATI Radeon 9250 256MB PCI
From: Vladimir Florinski (vflorins_at_ucr.edu)
Date: 10/25/05
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Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 05:51:04 GMT
On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 12:49:40 +0200, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> I have made Slackware packages of the nVidia binary drivers for internal
> use. However, if you know package management better, please advice me for
> the following scenario:
>
> About 50 machines running almost identical Slackware 9.1 installations.
> About 10 machines of those 50 have nVidia cards. About 5 of the nVidia
> machines have the binary driver package installed to make use of hardware
> 3D acceleration. 1 of the 5 nVidia binary driver machines gets its nVidia
> card replaced with a Matrox G550.
>
> How would your package management allow you to get a working hardware 3D
> acceleration with the Matrox card automatically?
We Fedora users have it easy. The Nvidia drivers are part of the
repository. They come as a set of two packages. The first contains only
the kernel module. This would be pulled in with yum every time the kernel
is updated. In Fedora, and most other RPM distros, new kernels are
installed alongside the old so nothing gets replaced. So this part is easy.
The X driver and libraries come in the second package. As you already
know, the Nvidia installer likes to overwrite some of X libraries (not to
mention leaving rather large files in /var/lib/nvidia which just sit there
eating up disk space). The RPM package does not do that. It installs the
libraries in /usr/lib/nvidia, so the original X libs remain intact. It
then places a file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d containing the path to the new
libraries. The ld.so loader looks there first and the Nvidia libs get
loaded instead of the xorg stuff. This way the driver and X can be updated
independently, so it's again quite easy. Could you recreate this behavior
in Slackware? It used to be my impression that "package management" and
"Slackware" don't belong in the same sentence, but if things have changed,
then good luck to you.
>
> The ATI binary drivers are able to co-exist with the OpenSource drivers as
> they don't replace any libraries. However, the binary drivers are still a
> mess and I don't recomend anyone to use them.
>
>> Generally, NVidia's performance is Linux is equal to or better than that
>> in Windows, while ATI's is substantially less (perhaps 1/2).
>
> I have been trying to find some benchmark page on the web confirming or
> contradicting the above statement. However, I haven't found any good
> benchmark. Do you have any example?
>
> In my own experience the binary driver from nVidia even though it has its
> drawbacks is easier to install, gives better performance and is more
> reliable than the ATI binary driver. So if I would buy a high-end card
> like a Radeon X850 or a GeForce 6800 I would go for an nVidia solution.
>
> However, for a low-end card like a Radeon 9250 or fx 5200 I would go for
> the ATI solution. The low-end ATI card has Opensource drivers which in my
> experience once again is easier to install (already included in Linux
> distribution), better performance (I did some testing more than a year
> ago, but forgot where I placed the results) and more reliable (the machine
> doesn't hang with opensource drivers while playing ut2004) than the ATI
> binary drivers.
>
I would trust Tom's/Anand's benchmarks in what the hardware can do. I
don't have any recent links to Linux benchmarks, but this somewhat old one
will show you how badly is ATI trounced by NVidia:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2302
Perhaps newer ATI or Xorg drivers made some improvement, but I wouldn't
expect the trend to change. Note that glxgears does not make a good
benchmark - it's basically a GPU frequency test (somewhat similar to a
bogomips rating).
-- Vladimir
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