upgrading video cards...

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 18:55 -0500, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Now that I'm a compiz fanatic... :) I'm thinking of upgrading my video 
> card. Is there any reason I should stick with NVidia? or are the ATI 
> cards just as good or better?

Very loaded question. :) If you're solely talking Compiz and the very
latest card from either nVidia or ATI, get nVidia. ATI's binary blob
doesn't yet work with the latest kernel + xorg combo that is in Fedora
10, while nVidia's works fine.

However... If you step back a generation or three, the entirely open
drivers for the ATI cards are quite good now -- Red Hat's own Dave
Airlie has been doing some fantastic work on them. My workstation at the
office has a Radeon X1900XT pushing dual 1680x1050 20" widescreens with
all he compiz bling and full-fledged kernel mode setting to boot (i.e.
text ttys are actually running at 1680x1050 too, and you get the full
effect of plymouth graphical boot). The Radeon X1000 series and HD 2000
series are both quite well supported, the HD3000 series less so, and the
HD4000 series notsomuch.

One other consideration... If you do any heavy A/V work, there is some
very cool stuff coming Real Soon Now from nVidia. They're exposing a
PureVideoHD-alike interface in their blob drivers, under the title VDPAU
(Video Decode and Presentation Acceleration for UNIX). Basically, it
allows you to offload any A/V codec ops to the GPU, including h.264 and
mpeg2 (aka Blu-Ray and HDTV). There are already mplayer patches (from
nVidia themselves, iirc), and the MythTV devs are hard at work on VDPAU
support as well -- even going so far as to tie into the GPU for video
transcoding, commercial flagging, etc. A number of other A/V progs are
following suit as well. Note that this is only for 9-series and 8-series
(except the early 8800GT) nVidia cards.

For me, everywhere but a Myth box, its mostly a toss-up between
current-gen Intel and a few gens old ATI -- no binary blob driver to
hassle with, and everything Just Works. For a Myth box, I'd have to give
the nod to nVidia for the VDPAU stuff.

--jarod