[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphic card for MPlayer

[The Wanderer]

Jindrich Makovicka wrote:

> Alain Ledesma wrote:
> 
>>> With NVidia you have to live with binary-only drivers, and with
>>> ATI you have to live without many features of the card.

Um... I compile my NVidia drivers myself, from source they provide. I
think there are some sort of legal restrictions involving what you can
do if you look at the source code, which means you can't actually do
much with it without getting yourself in trouble, but they aren't
provided as binaries.

>>> GATOS drivers are pretty-much _the_ drivers for ATI cards on 
>>> XFree86 systems, and the GATOS developers seem perfectly content 
>>> to only support the basic functions of the card.
>> 
>> So having an Ati card on a Linux system is a waste of money. Thanks
>>  I got mine from a friend at very low price!
> 
> AFAIK, there are binary-only drivers, which support much more
> features, so with ATi you can at least choose more features, but
> closed, or open, but with less features.

That depends on which card. I picked up a Radeon 9100 earlier this year,
and could not find working drivers for it *anywhere*. ATI didn't offer
any, the DRI didn't offer any, and though I don't remember why GATOS
didn't even seem like an option. From what I could find at the time,
just about every other chipset had available Linux drivers, but not the
chipset used to make that particular card.

The same chipset was used for a couple of other cards; the list of which
cards go with which chipset, or as authoritative a one as I found, is on
the DRI Website.

I still have that card... a perfectly good 3D video card, but since
everyone in the household runs either Linux or MacOS X - and we don't
know anyone who both runs Windows and could get use out of it - it's
just sitting around gathering dust. >_<

-- 
       The Wanderer

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.