[conspire] supported graphics cards?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Edmund J. Biow (biow at sbcglobal.net):

> While it is true that Nvidia has traditionally not been very
> forthcoming with providing details about its hardware to the open
> source community at least its proprietary driver "just works®" while
> the proprietary fglrx driver is a steamy pile of poorly documented
> poop, not just in Linux, but apparently even in Windows. Go talk to h2
> over at #smxi at irc.oftc.net if you want an earful about just how
> lousy fglrx is.  Unfortunately, the proprietary drivers are still much
> faster than the open source drivers for both ATI & Nvidia.  Intel
> still has the best open source support, but they don't really make
> dedicated video cards anymore, just onboard stuff, which isn't super
> fast if you are keen on gaming & 3D.

Yeah, I'm really not sure what can be best recommended in the way of
video _cards_ these days.  I used to say 'Screw both Nvidia and ATI. 
Use a Matrox.'  That was back in G200/G400 days.

Matrox still is out there, and still produces video cards, though their
market has shrunk quite a bit, and they mostly concentrate on
specialised niche markets.  I have no experience with their recent
models.

The wave of the future is, obviously, integrated video, on account of
ongoing gains in VLSI density and the advent of SoCs.  

> If you are willing to use the open source driver, though, radeon is
> generally better than the current open source nvidia driver, which is
> called nouveau.  

Right.  Sorry, I forgot about that nv -> nouveau transition.

Once again, though, I will add that all this pissing and moaning about
how the open-source X.org drivers fail to 'just work' and how
vendor-specific proprietary code -- code that, by the way, has such a
horrific record of introducing critical bugs into kernelspace that the
Linux kernel community had to invent the whole 'taint' flag
infrastructure so they weren't overwhelmed with misdirected bug reports
caused by secret vendor code -- is the right solution concerns brand-new
(6 mos. to 1 yr. old) chipsets.

Me, I'd do the intelligent thing and let other people be the beta
testers.

I can't help noticing that, by eschewing chipsets nobody's had time to
work out good open-source support for, I consistently end up with zero
driver problems.  Coincidence?  You decide.

I notice that all of this 'You need a recent Nvidia card and you need
the proprietary drivers because they Just Work[tm] and have peachy keen
high frame rates' propaganda arose _exactly_ during the dot-bomb lull in
the economy when snot-nosed gamer punks were damned near the only people
buying hardware, and they suddenly drowned out everyone else with their
adenoidal proclamations of the new reality.