[MPlayer-users] Re: Display card recommendations

[gabor]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 02:17, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 07:28:06PM -0400, Steven Adeff wrote:
> 
> You have no idea what you're talking about. The NVidia drivers are
> continuously broken. Read the archives and you'll see all the bugs in
> XV support and such. Many have been fixed, some still haven't (see my
> previous post). But these are definitely not "high quality" drivers by
> anyone's definition of high quality (except perhaps Microsoft's).

i have seen many mails about problems with nvidia cards,
and sometimes they were solved by  instructions like 
( "you have to install xfree86-devel.rpm " :-))))) sometimes not.

sometimes they were told that that's a bug in the nvidia drivers...

i have a geforce4 and haven't seen any problems like the ones
mentioned...

for me there is 1 problem:
sometimes ( once a week ) when i start a movie in mplayer , the xserver
dies... this can be a driver problem, but i don't know how to reproduce
it.. so i can't really help the driver developers with that...

otherwise i think it would be good to create a list of nvidia-bugs, just
to verify that they exist or not, and then i/we/you could send it to
nvidia to fix.... i know that in the faq is that mplayer-devels
contacted nvidia etc... so let's contact them again.....  
so could someone list me the most problematic nvidia bugs? because many
nvidia-problems are answered like "thats's  a known nvidia bug"... now
what are those known bugs?


> 
> On the other hand, old Matrox cards are well-supported and don't have
> these nonsense bugs again and again. Why? Because they're free
> software, developed by people who have access to the specs but aren't
> controlled by corporate whims. Just look at mga_vid, matroxfb, and the
> XF86 drivers. Now Parhelia is BAD and Matrox needs to get their act
> together and release full specs (not drivers, whether they be
> closed-source or free, but actual SPECS, so someone can make GOOD
> drivers!) but historically Matrox has been good about this stuff.
> We'll see how it goes this time. I won't be recommending Parhelia to
> anyone until there are free drivers....and probably not even then,
> since the card is overpriced, slow, and doesn't even have good 3d
> quality...

i think parhelia is an interesting card... not fast, but interesting...
it has a lot of interesting features ( like displacement mapping etc
).... but it won't show you any silly FPS in quake3 :-)

now let's talk about why are companies releasing closed-source drivers +
why they don't relelase the specs?

because for them it would be good too if other people would help them
develop the drivers etc...... so why?

i don't want arguments like 'because they're idiots' etc.... 

thanks,
gabor

-- 
That's life for you, said McDunn.  Someone always waiting for someone 
who never comes home.  Always someone loving something more than that 
thing loves them.  And after awhile you want to destroy whatever 
that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
                -- R. Bradbury, "The Fog Horn"