<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-15" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Martin Schuhmacher wrote: <blockquote cite="mid461E395B.5070200@gmx.net" type="cite">Hello, at the moment I'm using a Matrox G550 on PCIe Card. Its not that good on 2D. It seems, the closed driver is ugly. So, a new Card is to come... I have the choice between ATI and NVidia. At the moment i saw the "ATI Radeon X1650 PRO". </blockquote> Avoid ATI cards like the plague. ATI's drivers are substandard compared to both nVidia's drivers, and the open-source drivers. I've been stupid enough to buy a number of ATI cards, and ATI's drivers: - cause regular lockups - don't support anywhere near the feature list of nVidia's drivers or the open-source Radeon drivers - have pathetic XRENDER performance ( an order of magnitude slower in my testing ) - has had broken xv support for over a year - is not in active development This last point may raise some eyebrows. Seriously though, ATI have added precisely nothing over the past year, apart from another dodgy motif-looking control panel. They've somehow managed to break things along the way though ( r200 support, xv, software suspend, custom modelines ). The mind boggles. If you must buy an ATI, for God's sake, get one that's supported by the r300 driver ( luckily mine is ). <blockquote cite="mid461E395B.5070200@gmx.net" type="cite">What about the ati driver performance on 2d ? </blockquote> Very, very bad. ATI's 2D performance compared to the open-source Radeon driver's performance is quite bad, even when you just compare it to XAA performance. But the Radeon driver also supports EXA, and this make the difference in performance between the 2 even wider. Admittedly, the r300 driver only has sketchy EXA support at the moment, but at least you can imagine this situation improving. I did some benchmarking ages ago on my Apple Powerbook ( 1Ghz G4 with a 64MB Radeon 9250 ) with Enlightenment-0.17 with the XRENDER engine. Unfortunately I don't have the figures sitting around at the moment ( I posted them to the Enlightenment list, so I can track them down if you really want ), but I can say this: the performance was very good ... ie quite fluid, low CPU usage, etc. When I do exactly the same benchmark on my current system ( a 2.2Ghz Turion with a 256MB Radeon X700 Mobility ), my CPU usage goes to 100% and I get about 2 frames per second. It's absolutely pathetic, and quite clearly outclassed by much older hardware, with much better drivers. Other people have benchmarked and actually kept the details around. For example, check out bug #7 at ATI's 'unofficial' bugzilla: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7">http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7</a> >From the above bug report: <pre id="comment_text_24"><blockquote type="cite"><pre id="comment_text_24">Radeon X1400 Mobility, fglrx 8.33.6, Core 2 Duo T7400: 240000 reps @ 0.0285 msec ( 35000.0/sec) Radeon 7500 Mobility, X.org radeon 6.6.3, Pentium-M 1.3 Ghz: 3200000 reps @ 0.0019 msec (534000.0/sec) Geforce 6600, Nvidia 97.46, Athlon X2 4200+: 24000000 reps @ 0.0003 msec (3990000.0/sec) Yes, you read that correctly, the Radeon X1400 is 15x slower than the (now obsolete) Radeon 7500, and 114x slower than the (similarly priced) Geforce 6600. To buy new hardware only to find that it's exponentially slower than the old hardware at the most basic of tasks is insulting. There shouldn't be any problem with making the X1400 *at least* as fast as the 7500, and preferably, competitive with it's similarly priced competition. Unless this situation is rectified (either by the fglrx drivers being fixed, or documentation being released so that open source drivers can be developed), I will not buy any more ATI hardware, simply because it is embarrassingly slow.</pre></blockquote> </pre> <blockquote cite="mid461E395B.5070200@gmx.net" type="cite">Since the bad experiences with the matrox, is it known to work with x.org 7.0 on dual dvi ? </blockquote> You should have no problem setting this up, whatever card you get. I have my current Radeon working with pseudo-xinerama mode with MergedFB. ATI's drivers have dual-head support, but I've never used it, so I can't really comment on it. nVidia's cards also have dual-head support. Also keep in mind the Intel graphics chipsets now have excellent support. <div class="moz-signature">-- <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title>sig</title> Daniel Kasak IT Developer NUS Consulting Group Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060 T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989 email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dkasak@nusconsulting.com.au">dkasak@nusconsulting.com.au</a> website: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nusconsulting.com.au">http://www.nusconsulting.com.au</a> </div> </body> </html>