F8 vs F9

[Anne Wilson]

On Wednesday 13 August 2008 20:38, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 14:08:00 -0500,
>
>   Arthur Pemberton <pemboa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Lyvim Xaphir <knightmerc at yahoo.com> 
wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 09:42 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > >> On Tuesday 12 August 2008 15:50, Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
> > >> > If you have ATI, F8 is the only way to go.  F9 is not good for ATI
> > >> > cards, the ati drivers won't support any x server greater than
> > >> > 1.4.2.
> > >>
> > >> I presume you mean for accelerated desktop effects?  Certainly for
> > >> 'normal' use there is no problem.
> > >
> > > "Normal" is folks who want to get the money out of their hardware as
> > > opposed to a GNU cultist that's willing to accept substandard behavior
> > > in the driver
> >
> > You casually call them cultist, but you feel comfortable using their
> > software?
>
> At least some of the ATI cards do get accelerated graphics in F9 using the
> drivers that come with Fedora. I have an r530 based card that works. It may
> not use all of the features of the card, but glxgears suggests that it
> works reasonably well.
> If anything, people with ATI cards should be trying F9 first and falling
> back only if they have problems and require 3D acceleration features.

I have read several reviews which suggest that we should not write them off, 
despite problems in the past.  The recent problems with NVidia cards and KDE4 
show just how complex the problems are.  NV acknowledge the problem to be 
theirs.  Not because they have been negligent, and not because KDE4 does 
something wrong, but because new boundaries are being stretched, and routines 
that the boards were supposed to support had never actually seen any heavy 
use before.  NV and NV users will gain from these insights, but temporarily 
there is a problem with some of their newest cards.

Anne