Re: Graphics card ?
- From: Aragorn <aragorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 03:41:40 +0200
twager wrote:
I am about to buy a new box and have a choice between the GeForce
8400gs and the GeForce 8600gt both with 256 mb ddr2..I am not a gamer
but do run compiz-fusion...Anyone tell me if I will notice a difference
between these cards ?
As others have highlighted already, in technical terms, the 8600 will be
faster than the 8400. However, how _much_ faster in real life is the
question you should be asking yourself, because the difference will be
truly minute even when playing serious games.
If your 3D requirements solely comprise of the use of Compiz Fusion, then
picking the 8600 over the 8400 will allow you to render the rotating cube
approximately 0.03 nanoseconds faster than with the 8400, so whether that
justifies the extra cost for an 8600 is your call only. :p
It does however deserve to be noticed that nVidia does not offer its drivers
as Free & Open Source Software - they are notorious for refusing to do so -
and that any body of proprietary software statistically contains about 300
times more bugs than a comparable body of open source code - I'm not making
this up; this was established as a fact a few years ago already. As video
drivers run in kernelspace, you should therefore ask yourself whether you
want to risk your machine crashing (and losing important data) because of
buggy proprietary drivers.
As I (mis)understand it, Intel is now also moving into the market for
plug-in video adapters, and most (if not all) of their hardware is
supported via FOSS drivers. If I were you, I'd examine that possibility
first before going for nVidia or ATi.
The latter has now been bought by AMD and although AMD wants to release the
ATi drivers as FOSS, they can't do that just yet for now as the drivers
still contain proprietarily licensed code, and they would be in violation
of the pertaining copyrights if they were to release that code to the
public. So they'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch first, and
up until then, ATi drivers are still proprietary, and even (far) worse in
quality than those of nVidia, due to the fact that ATi has always had far
fewer driver developers on their team than nVidia.
Your mileage may and will vary, but those are my thoughts... ;-)
--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.
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