New Card just for Linux

[watanabe]

Hi, I have a ATI radeon 7500 right now and have gotten sick of trying to make it work with winex... I'm a bit confused about what nvidia card to replace it with. I want to spend less than $200, i was originally considering a 5200FX ultra, but found out they are basically MX's, so now I'm looking at the 4800SE's (gainward oem one for $164@newegg).

I just wanna be able to play everquest in linux at the same level of performance, preferably higher, than what I got w/my 7500 in windows. System specs are as follows:

XP1700
ECS K7S5A
768MB ddr 3200 @2100
radeon 7500
Gentoo linux w/gaming-sources kernel 2.4.20-r1
(installed f/stage-1, running xf86 4.3 and openbox)

Will the 4800SE fulflill my needs? How much easier/better are nvidia's linux drivers than ati's?

Sorry if this isn't very coherent, spent all last night trying to get DRI workin on this POS radeon. :P

[nileshbansal]

Nvidia cards also dont have a very good support and i would suggest go for some card with open source drivers as that would have much better linux support.

[Kiamu]

i for myself had no problems with any nvidia video card i installed under linux. i rather had problems with the open source drivers and very recent video cards. (generell problem in linux with recent hardware ;) )

i think it is most likely very dependent on which distribution you use. (i prefer Slackware or LFS over RH and SuSE and _never_ had any problems regarding nvidia video cards - and i am running a network with 20+ machines)

[bwkaz]

It also depends on your motherboard's AGP chipset. Buggy AGP implementations still abound, and still cause problems.

Don't get the 4800 if you're only thinking of using it because it has AGP 8x on it. Even if your ECS motherboard has an AGP 8x slot (which I doubt), the implementation of AGP 3.0 in the drivers isn't all that great. Hopefully it's getting better in the agpgart driver, but I don't know for sure, you'd have to track the kernel changelog.

[watanabe]

EDIT: I don't care about marketing hyberbole(AGP8x)
Right now I'm using my the new drivers that came out in X4.3.0 and im getting 115 frames per second, I had them working before, but had to recompile my kernel for ALSA/Samba/vfat support. So I just want a company that provides regular, decent drivers. Its funny, rage3d users are drooling over some drivers released at some german site for the FireGL line of cards that can be hacked to work w/8500-9700 radeons, thats how pitiful ati support is, even with an open source liscense.
It was my understanding, and from visiting this forum and seeing andy's post everywhere I think I'm right, that nvidia had much better support, at least they seem to work on their drivers.
bwkaz: so would a GF4 4400 be basically the same as the 4800SE?
EDIT: Would there be any benefit from going w/a 4800SE over a 4400? Cause they are the same price on pricewatch...

[bwkaz]

I am not sure on all the differences, but I believe the only main one (and this is just from a couple of ads I've seen, so for whatever that's worth -- probably not much...) is that the 4800SE just supports AGP 8x. AFAIK that's the only difference.

Perhaps the amount of (or the clock speed of) video memory is different, too, I don't know.

Personally, my "really-want" card in the GF4 line is the Ti4600, but the 4400 isn't all that bad. It should work, at least. ;) I've got an MSI Ti4200, which works pretty well.

[watanabe]

Thanks for the quick reply :) is there any difference between the 4600 and 4400 other than clockspeed? I ask because the 4800SE gainward model comes overclocked very close to stock 4600 speeds. costs only 164@newegg for the OEM version w/3.6 ns ram or 199 for retail w/3.3ns.

[bjlockie]

Originally posted by nileshbansal
Nvidia cards also dont have a very good support and i would suggest go for some card with open source drivers as that would have much better linux support.

nvidia cards have great support.
Both ATI and nvidia have good support in the latest XFree 4.3 and nvidia has a good closed source binary driver that supports most (or all) of their current chipsets.
I don't the current status of the ATI linux binaries but there was a time that they were slow to support new cards under Linux.

ATI seemed to have a history of not being very nice to Linux (maybe they were were more high profile than nvidia since there were more ATI cards in use earlier on).

[nileshbansal]

I have a riva TNT2 card and i even after doing everything posible i am not able to get full 3D acceleration from my card. After installing nvidia drivers it shows my card has 3d support but glxgears output is very bad (200 FPS) and i am not able to play games like racer as i get a very low fps (i can play similiar games in windows). My friend has a GeForce 4 440 SE and even after installing nvidia drivers he cant get fps above above 700 in glxgears in default window size.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by watanabe
is there any difference between the 4600 and 4400 other than clockspeed? I do not believe there's a difference. It's the same chipset, the GF4 Ti (NV25).

[10k]

I would not reccomend an ati card in linux. first, if you have an nforce2, AGP doesnt work.

second, TVout doesnt work.

third, ati doesnt respond to emails regarding linux drivers

fourth, winex is broken w/ ati cards (should be fixed soon).

I had a radeon9500 in linux for 2 months and i just couldnt take the awfulsupport anymore and sold it.

Now i've got a gf4 and its much better supported. IMO Nvidia is the only way to go in linux.

cheers
10k

[3777]

Nvidia is definitely the only way to go f you use Linux. I have a TI4600 card and have had no problems whatsoever. I've run UT2003 in Red Hat and Slackware without a hitch. Also have a KT400 based MB.

[tealeaf]

I have long supported ATI because I have viewed NVIDIA as the *evil corp* of the graphics card market.

Like everyone else I wish NVIDIA would open source their drivers, but I must say this.

If you want a modern graphics card that just *works* in Linux, you just can't beat NVIDIA. It's basically the only card that *just works* in Linux, and I mean mostly every feature, latest hardware, etc. Sure, it's not perfect, but other cards are not even close. If I have to choose between crappy open source support and top notch closed source support, I'll take closed source, because it is enabling me to use Linux comfortably. Otherwise, I might not use Linux as much, and that would be a bad thing, because Linux itself is a great OS and I like using it and it would suck if I couldn't use it for some silly technicality, like non-working/flakey graphics card support.

So while ATI does (or did?) play well with open source by opening up their specs to open source devs, you have to wonder, who is better? If you are a pragmatic person, you look at results. And I think results speak for themselves: NVIDIA drivers are better.

There is only one problem and that is integration. NVIDIA drivers are poorly integrated and what this means is that you can't have a nicely working XFree86 right after installing your favorite distro (mostly true). Another problem is that when you upgrade your kernel, X is broken until you reinstall NVIDIA drivers. This is the kind of problem that might not exist were NVIDIA drivers open sourced.

Anyway, I highly recommend you get some cheap NVIDIA card, even GF3 will do, and be happy. Alternatively, you can get an older ATI card like plain old Radeon 64 (it's supported very well). Of the high end cards, NVIDIA has Linux support that just can't be matched, open source issues aside.

[micval]

Before you buy anything, borrow it from a friend first (if you can) and try it. I have the same MB (ECS K7S5A) and I just bought GF4MX440 and OpenGL games don't work anymore in my Linux (they do, but after a few minutes of playing the system freezes completely, in W2K it works fine).

Anyway, if you find any newer nvidia card working fine with the ecs mb, please let me know (my former tnt2 pro was ok, but too slow i-)