nVidia vs. ATI

[ted leslie]

I struggled with a nvidia card alot recently, it was a top model when bought about 1.5 years ago. 
As far as drivers went, i only had one problem, when i switched to a brand new 2.6.X kernel,
there drivers compiled with error, i wrote them, they had it fixed almost immediately so I give them
top marks for that. But I recently had to go back to ATI, why?
for any video app that used XV  i.e. mplayer -vo xv, the playback window would eventually
always go BLUE and stay that way , and id have to shutdown and releaunch my X11,
something i hate doing because i usually run with about 60 windows open across 13 desktop screens
and go usually 200+ days between reboots so it was annoying with this new Nvidia to almost
daily have to restart X.
It also seemed to periodically crash hard. 
With ATI it all went away. This blue XV screen has been reported (on google news a dozen times)
but no one has clearly identified the problem and thus no fixes. I think with a nvidia card 
5 years ago on a Windows OS (yeah i hate to admit it, but i used windoes about 5 years ago :( ) 
i also had the problem.
So i see this as a show stopper for nvidia. I wouldnt buy one of the cards again until they
100% identified and fixed this problem.
The work around is to  -vo x11   or -vo <openGL> but the hardware accel. and overlay caps.
arent th same.
I also have had no problem with the gatos for my ati for vid cap.
In fact the reason i switched to Linux 5 years ago was that win2000 and ati radeon vid cap ...
it crashed win2000 OS dead m,ultiple times a day, and i tried everytjing, new ram, mobo, bios settings,
switch to linux and gatos and ati card never crashed! I switched to nvidia 1.5 years ago just as part of a whole
system upgrade and had the BLUE playback video problem and just lived with it, ( -vo x11 ) 
but finally decided it was better to have a machine tht never had to have X11 reset and be a bit slower,
then have that happen, so back to ATI. 

-tl

On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 02:11:38PM -0400, Francois Ouellette wrote:
> ATI always had excellent hardware but very poor drivers, on any platform I
> know! The best product they had was probably the old EGA wonder :-)
> 
> For years I bought ATI cards for my machines and last year decided to give
> up and switch to nVidia, which offers imnmensely better software and
> support. Unfortunately...
> 
>  François Ouellette
> <fouellet-cpI+UMyWUv9BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>
> 
> 
> > I am in the process of writing an new article that
> > deals with video cards which I hope will be published
> > on the Linux Journal website.
> >
> > As part of the article I will need to offer
> > suggestions as to what sort of video card to buy. Now
> > I like the idea of promoting firms that are based in
> > Canada, and even better firms that are based in the
> > greater Toronto area (and video card builder ATI with
> > it's headquarters in Markham counts).
> >
> > However, all reports I have seen give ATI (very) poor
> > marks for the Linux video card drivers (compared to
> > nVidia), and reports of ATI Linux install issues are
> > also discouraging (compared to nVidia). So the
> > question is can I suggest people seriously look at ATI
> > as reasonable Linux option?
> >
> >
> >
> > Colin McGregor
> >
> > P.S. Just out of curiosity how many people on the list
> > have written for/been paid for computer related
> > publications over the past year? If Marcel Gagne is
> > still on the list he would take top prize. I know
> > Chris Johnson, William Park and I have, who else?
> >
> > --
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> 
> 
> --
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> 
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