Re: MSI RS482M4-ILD (Radeon Xpress 200 chipset)

On Fri, 26 May 2006 12:51:41 +0200, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:

Miguel De Anda <miguel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
if I choose nVidia built in graphics I know for sure that DRI is not
going to work with the opensource nv driver. Instead of replacing ATI
with nVidia I would rather choose a motherboard with a via unichrome or
intel built in graphics.

Is there any reason in particular you can't use the closed source
drivers?

Except that they taint my kernel with all that means I have also some bad
experiences from machines with nVidia binary drivers. I have seen machines
hang completely when OpenGL programs are used. I have one machine at work
with an nVidia card which needs the binary driver to use a dual screen.
That machine often gives some strange segfaults when trying to run KDE.
This happens both on the local console and when logging in with xdmcp.

It must be a KDE bug (and you shouldn't be using xdm anyway). In my
department, where I set hardware policies, use of opensource video drivers
is strongly discouraged (with the exception of laptops, where Nvidia
doesn't have a large presence). Opensource drivers are amateurish, of poor
quality and performance, crash often, break on updates, and it's hard to
get bugs fixed or receive help from developers. Nvidia drivers are written
by professionals, virtually never crash (and when there is a problem,
it is easy to report to NVidia and the fix is usually available in the
next update), and have excellent performance. That has been my experience
with dozens of systems. The only ones that crashed had ATI, Matrox, and
Intel cards running opensource drivers.

Out
of about 30 machines this is the only one having problems and the only
thing that makes it differ from other machines is that it has a dual
screen and runs the nVidia driver. I have tried memtest86 without finding
any errors on the machine. I suspect the binary driver, but without the
source I am unable to debug it, I can only hope that a newer version of
the driver is going to fix the problems one day.

You would not be able to debug it even if you had the source (and nobody
would except Nvidia engineers). The driver is more complex than the kernel
and there is simply no talent or experience within the opensource
community to understand the code (much less develop an equivalent driver).


Nvidia drivers are nice and seem to always work.

The binary drivers are good enough for a home gaming system. However, in
my experience they are not good enough for a server which is supposed to
be up 24/7 with local and remote users logged in from the network. It is
not OK if such a machine hangs once a month.

I am not talking about servers here. These can be run without video cards
at all.

I have that video chipset on my laptop and the ati drivers seem to be
very bad and my laptop crashes quiet often if I try to do any 3d
stuff... sometimes just the video display goes black-white... (I just
made up that term for when my display goes black, but the backlight goes
to 1000% brighness). Of course I'm using the closed source drivers for
that.

So you have the Xpress 200 chipset? Are there any particular reason that
you use the closed source driver? Doesn't DRI work with the opensource
radeon or r300 driver? I agree that the ATI binary driver is a lot worse
than the nVidia binary driver.

I've got a nehemiah 10000 board with the unichrome chipset but I've
never managed to get acceleration to work on it. I hardly use it though,
but I really need acceleration on it.. even if its just 2d. I'm using
slackware and wouldn't want to move to fedora (or whatever their drivers
are built for, source drivers seem to be a pain to setup)

Been there, done that. About a year ago I followed the steps in the VIA
Unichrome and DRI HOWTO at
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=26963&group_id=102048
So I have DRI working on Unichrome. However, I haven't used it enough to
be able to tell if it is stable. The main feature on my unichrome machine
is xvmc as it is supposed to be used as a PVR.

Just my two cents.

Thanks for your input. If it turns out that the Xpress 200 based board
from MSI is a bad choice I am now considering an AOpen i945GTm-VHL.
However, that motherboard costs about 3 times as much as the MSI board. It
also requires more expensive SO-DIMM and intel core (duo) CPU. Such a
system will probably end up at least twice as expensive and with less
performance than an Athlon 3000+ based system.


Well, if opensource is your religion, you should expect to pay more. I do
have the Intel 945 chipset in my laptop, and its 3D performance is abysmal
with the i810 driver. Actually, its software rendering speed (tested with
vesafb) was better than hardware rendering!

--
Vladimir

.

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