On Sun, September 14, 2014 10:08 am, Chris wrote: > On 09/12/2014 04:33 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote: >> Yes, it seems to be about time for Linux folks to stop liking NVIDIA >> (and >> being stuck with proprietary binary drivers) and start liking more >> others >> who provide more documentation about their card internals thus giving >> open >> source teams enough information to maintain decently working open source >> drivers. > > I'm also using proprietary NVIDIA drivers. > >> [ - The one who favored ATI some 12 years back at the peak of Linux love >> to NVIDIA ;-)] > > Which graphics board would you recommend? > I'm not an expert to recommend something. I myself am using ATI usually (even after they were bought out by AMD). Usually Dell workstations (Desktops actually) have ATI card as one of choices. These cards are good ones, with discrete video memory (to the contrary to some video chips with "shared" memory, and yes, there are ATI videochips like with shared memory found in some laptops). So basically, if I'm awfully cautious I double check that it is discrete video memory. You know what "shared" memory is, right? It is portion of main RAM that that bad chip uses as its video memory. In addition to the fact that you are not getting some hardware (video RAM) that is implied by specifications, there is architecturally awful thing about that: you have video traffic (60 video frames per second worth, or 50 frames in Europe) on the memory bus. The traffic that doesn't belong there in the first place, as video RAM is used for your screen content always. And portion of your RAM bandwidth is stolen as well. I would void computer science degree of the idiot who invented that. But its continuing existence is due to sad fact that mass customer is basing the choice in "pricegrabber" results to the contrary to technical worthiness.. Just my 2 c. Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++