Free Software and 3D Graphics: nVida, AMD/Radeon or Integrated Graphics?
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It is hard to know what to go with.
nVidia regularly release great working Linux drivers, but they are proprietary and closed source, I believe. The drivers work well with many 3D games. nVidia really do not try and support free software as a company, for some reason, so people say. (Linus recently said that they were the worst company to work with, for some reason.)
AMD/Radeon release open source GNU/Linux drivers. I believe these drivers would be free, but there is a small binary blob in them, which AMD/Radeon need for protection of some sort. AMD seem to be giving support to free software - they are meant to try and back the Coreboot project, but I haven't heard of them paying for any development there. Also, afaik, AMD don't produce mass market motherboards, so their support for Coreboot and a free BIOS might not matter. Also, this Coreboot support is not the issue I am here concerned about. From what I have heard, the non-proprietary AMD/Radeon drivers don't work too well with Linux games, which defeats the whole point of getting a fast graphics card.
The third choice, there might be others, I don't know, is to forgo a dedicated graphics card altogether and rely upon the 3D graphics integrated into the chipset on the motherboard. I don't know how good the latest integrated graphics are, but they wouldn't be up to playing the latest 3D games, I think.
What do you think is the way to go here? I would very much like to hear your opinions and reasoning.
Thank you!
Intel is the only company that supports free graphics. It's got a fully free driver. Works great with 3D.
AMD (ATI) has released parts of the driver under a free license. The fully free driver is not good. No 3D and artifacts.
Nvidia hasn't co-operated at all. However, there is a reverse engineered free driver that can do 3D.
So, if we only look at graphics cards, Intel is the way to go. But on the other hand Intel wifi cards are notorious for not working with free software. And replacing the wifi card with a supported card is tricky since many vendors have short whitelists of wireless cards they only accept and the user has to possibly crack his own machine (BIOS or the wifi card) to be able to use a non-whitelisted wifi card. http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/Mini_PCIe_slot_restrictions_on_wireless_cards
It is really hard to know what to go with...
On 26/06/12 19:04, name at domain wrote:
> It is hard to know what to go with.
Yeeehi,
Trisquel goes by what complies with the free software definition. So
you can rule out ATI/AMD straight off as their 3D support is proprietary.
Intel integrated graphics are the best supported in terms of free
software drivers (AIUI Intel write them at least in part). So if you
are buying then go for that first.
If you're stuck with on board graphics that aren't up to what you need
then 3D support that is adequate to some games is available in nouveau
(the free software nVidia driver) and good enough for some 3D games as
of Trisquel 5.5. See this thread for a discussion and the place to
purchase a best value desktop card that is guaranteed to work.
http://trisquel.info/en/forum/graphics-cards-3d-acceleration-and-gaming
Free software games are a different animal to mass market games. You
have to think of them as a different way of getting your gaming fun. In
similar way to retro games being a different kind of fun to modern mass
market games. They're still fun after all. Of course motivated by
freedom we are not interested in buying the non-free mass market stuff
which is the majority, if not all, of what you'll find in your local
game store.
Leny
Here are my few cents:
If you want full compatibility with best featureset under free license then stick to Intel. In general Intel will be quite pricy compared to AMD CPUs. Despite the big "stinko" master Torvalds has sent towards NVidia, they still provide the best 3D performance, most stable driver set and best Video acceleration under Linux if you use their propritary driver, which is of course a no-no under Trisquel. By using Noveau they still will perform great and can easily beat the fastest Intel stuff available. If you dig a bit in the forum / mailing list you will find a few postings of me where my old AMD dualcore (2x2.7 GHz) with GeForce 9800GT could still compete under Xonotic with the fastest Intel CPU plus fastest onboard graphic adapter. I can through together a system like mine with a fast used NVidia GPU from the bay plus silent GPU cooler for below 300€ while the Intel opponent (Intel i7 3770K) plus motherboard costs > 450€.
You be the judge !
Noveau has its issues though like lack of power management (e.g. fast spinning fans, higher power consumption) which you can compensate by choosing a low-power AMD CPU and simply applying a silent cooling solution to your NVidia GPU.
If you want issue-free 1080p playback you should either get an Intel-based system or simply use an NVidia adapter with a fast enough CPU (> 2-4x2.7 GHz).
While AMD cards are a big no-no under Trisquel as well because of their ucode required to run the free radeon driver, they provide a better 3D feature set compared to Nouveau but not as good as Intel.
I am a member!
I communicated a while back with various developers working on graphics drivers & distributions to the source for gaming/video testing and review. The conclusion of it all. The 9500 series is the way to go. Between stability, features, performance and price. I would not recommend it though over a new system with Intel graphics. The low end nVidia is comparable to the newer Intel graphics chipsets and in a number of areas better.
Here is the graphics card we are shipping:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/geforce-9500gt-1gb-pci-express-20-video-card-gnulinux
Note: 512MB is all you really need. For business reasons we are shipping the 1GB version (the price difference is minuscule to non-existent).
There is a great review of various nvidia cards, including the 9500gt, comparing their performance on a variety of games and benchmarks using both the latest nvidia binary blob and the latest nouveau drivers here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_june_2012&num=1
As a general impression, the 9500gt didn't fare that much worse on nouveau than on the binary blob. With faster cards though, there were gigantic performance improvements using the binary blob over nouveau.
There is another nice, thorough article on the Phoronix site looking at how well the very latest HD 4000 Intel Ivy Bridge integrated graphics chipset works with GNU/Linux, too:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_june_2012&num=1
In a seperate Phoronix article it says:
- The Intel Windows OpenGL driver has moved onto supporting OpenGL 4.0 while the Intel Linux driver only complies with the OpenGL 3.0 specification. OpenGL 3.1 is not even expected within Intel's Mesa driver until 2013.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_ivybridge_redux&num=1
I am a member!
The Intel situation is unfortunate although not terribly surprising. You have to remember to keep things in perspective. There are lots of advantages to GNU/Linux overall that puts Microsoft Windows to shame besides being free. Not everything should be about hardware (I know I know, sort of a weird thing for me to say). Hardware is only part of the equation though. The software that runs on top of hardware is really what ones after. If you value your freedom OpenGL 3 is certainly good enough. Besides that though for the majority of users on any platform there are many advantages to using GNU/Linux over getting the "latest and greatest" on Microsoft Windows.
I'd rather buy a system that respects my freedom that I can fully take advantage of than a system which does not.
I know none of the people here would ever touch Microsoft Windows although I will tell you that it runs terribly slowly for the majority of users. It is so bad as to be describable as unbearable (for those use to running GNU/Linux). I don't care how much more powerful the hardware one runs is it is unbearable for the large majority of Microsoft Windows users. The only reason some might say "it's fast enough" is that they haven't experienced GNU/Linux or free software.
When an Intel Atom with 2GB of ram outperforms a 6GB dual-core Microsoft Windows system at a fraction of the price you know there is something wrong. That is the situation I see almost every day. I work with a lot of ex-Microsoft Windows users who have switched to the Penguin Wee (the first generation $249 model based on Intel Atom- although there are also some Penguin Air users too). I get to see first hand how slow the systems are of people running Microsoft Windows. The one thing I can say conclusively is I've never seen a slow GNU/Linux system even with the latest updates (comparatively speaking). Until you can say the system is unbearably slow you haven't experienced a typical Microsoft Window's users system.
Chris,
sorry for being OT:
>although I will tell you that it runs terribly slowly for the majority of users.
> It is so bad as to be describable as unbearable (for those use to running GNU/Linux).
> I don't care how much more powerful the hardware one runs is it is unbearable for the
>large majority of Microsoft Windows users.
Wow, I smell big prejudice and hearsay in this statement.
>When an Intel Atom with 2GB of ram outperforms a 6GB dual-core
>Microsoft Windows system at a fraction of the price you know
>there is something wrong. That is the situation I see almost
>every day.
And what systems do you see here ?
I have an AMD E-350 (as you might remember) with 8GB running Xubuntu. It is really blazingly fast. A colleague runs a pretty identical system with Windows 7 and it is fast as well. I would bet that it doesn't make a big difference here if you cut down memory to 3-4 GB. I can hardly imagine why someone would buy a system with below 4 GB anyhow nowadays. My 2x4GB DDR3 kit costed something around 33€ IIRC.
My point here: Linux folks should not devalue MS operating systems. This gives a bad taste. A well set up Windows 7 will run as fast and as
stable as the latest Linux installation with a more demanding desktop environment (e.g. Gnome 3, KDE, Unity). Most Windows systems I have seen from friends or relatives which became amazingly slow often face similar issues: Either the system is overloaded with pre-installed crap from the PC vendors themself, which you can of course not de-install because you only have a resuce CD or the users themself put so many test / trial / freeware programs to them plus gazillions of toolbars inside Firefox / IE. This will of course bog down even a quadcore system with 4 GB of RAM. You can dislike MS Windows because it is propritary closed source stuff which phones home but do not devalue it because of hearsay facts.
This are just my observations. I am no M$ fanboy but I am no Linux fanboy either. Being an engineer I judge on what I can see and test myself.
Regards,
Holger
I am a member!
I think maybe I should go into some detail here because clearly you aren't seeing what I'm seeing.
It's just an observation remember. If you look at the statistics it's something like 90% of computer users are infected. That's according the "security industry". I'm not going to say this is an accurate statistic although I do believe it isn't far off.
And as far as how this came to be. What do you think slows down most Microsoft Windows systems? None of what I am saying is an exaggeration. You might argue this isn't the fault of Microsoft though. I'd then disagree with you though. It's Microsoft's design choices which have resulted in the general populaces inability to maintain a clean system.
It's also the result of proprietary software. There is more sharing of code on GNU/Linux and less bloat. If you stick a printer into a GNU/Linux system it just works. It gets detected, added, and setup in an instant usually (provided it is a properly supported free software compatible device). Try and do the same thing in a Microsoft Windows environment and usually the user has to install significant bloat. Something that takes 5-10 seconds and is done automatically without the users intervention takes 40 minutes on the typical Microsoft Windows users system. If you don't believe me find a Microsoft Windows user's system and a copy of an HP driver CD. Go and try it. On average it takes 40 minutes. Now try and do this with a GNU/Linux system like Trisquel. While it's not entirely due to the lack of sharing code it's partially responsible.
I'm not talking about the people you interact with everyday either. Chances are they are well educated and slightly better able to comprehend what is going on. Any user on these forums is almost certainly going to be from a different segment of society than the majority. Technical skills put you in that segment. The majority though don't have that IT person to constantly tell them these things. So even your parents/friends/relatives/colleges have an advantage over the majority. They don't have someone updating the system for them. There are dozens of applications which need to be updated on Microsoft Windows which would be automatically updated on GNU/Linux (or there would be one screen and one button to update all the core applications).
This is an desktop / OS design issue that is always overlooked by those arguing GNU/Linux security. It's not the permission issue, root, etc which makes GNU/Linux more resilient. I'm not going to tell you those aren't of value. They are. It's just the ease of which GNU/Linux systems are updated, integrated, and share code makes them better suited for the casual user.
The hardware is important to the extent that it is free for most users. Whether it is OpenGL 3.0 or 3.1 or even 4.0 is likely irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter. Most users are fine with an Intel Atom system /w 3-4GB of ram. The i3 is nice although not necessarily going to give them much of an advantage. The web, email, and basic word processing doesn't require a high end system. It requires a solution that is better designed than Microsoft Windows.
This isn't to say there aren't other areas we need to improve on. Particularly from a software perspective. There are... I won't even go there because the list is very very long. This community needs to coordinate more and work on developing business strategies to fund development that are not as dependent on large corporations.
:)
Now lets drop this. I didn't really want to go here.
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