Fedora Core 5 Idea

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

> I don't know of a video card with an open source driver that has the 3D
> performance of NVidia, and 3D is really the only reason to run the
> nvidia binary drivers anyway (I have no problems with the open source
> nvidia drivers for 2D)

I don't want to start a flame war here, but the r200 open-source
driver is *very* fast and very high quality.

The current CVS code from Mesa and DRI is even better than what
we have in Xorg 6.8.2.  Doom 3 runs nicely and it's quite fast.

Even though glxgears isn't a comrehensive benchmark suite, I'd
like to point out that I get 2800-3000 fps with a Radeon 8500
card using the latest CVS code.  NVidia cards usually score
less than 2000 fps.

Then I switched to a Radeon 9600 card with the reverse-engineered
r300 driver developed on SourceForge.  This driver already renders
quake, doom and many other programs correctly, altough it's not
yet as fast as the r200 driver was, and there are outstanding
security and stability problems that prevent merging this code
back into DRI and Mesa.

So at this time I'd recommend Radeon cards to Linux users because
their OSS drivers are very good.  We all hope one day NVidia will
publish their source code or enough documentation to add 3D support
to the nv driver.  If not, the r300 project showed that a
reverse-engineering approach isn't impossible.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/