Graphics Cards, 3D Acceleration, and Gaming

The older GeForce series cards should work pretty well although I wouldn't advise upgrading to one. There may be no benefit from doing so. Newer Intel graphics chipsets are actually better than some of the older GeForce chipsets or comparable to the low end NVidia chipsets. There are also features missing in the NVidia chipsets like video that are supported in the Intel chipsets. This is one of the things that made coming out with a Home Theater PC challenging. The card we are selling is mainly good for those looking to game or replace an older or incompatible (no 3d mainly) video card.

Just to be clear this is *the* card to get. It is the best compromise of features, support, and performance. There are some others which will work too although if you go too new you won't have good support. If you go too old a model you might as well not have bought it as you won't be gaining much (maybe anything).

* duplicate *

The older GeForce series cards should work pretty well although I wouldn't
advise upgrading to one. There may be no benefit from doing so. Newer Intel
graphics are actually better than some of the older GeForce chipsets and
there are also features of this model we are selling which are not supported
(video). The card we are selling is mainly useful to those looking to game or
replace an older or incompatible (no 3d mainly) video card.

Will my Penguin Libre get it?

I have got one Nvidia and I will try it as soon as possible. It's quite old,
so it's possible that it will be run properly. I hope so and I thank all the
developper team.

How is the current support for AMD FUSION video?
I am considering a laptop with that.

Chris,

thanks for your efforts and providing a working card with NVidia chipset for
Trisquel. The last few days I played around with Trisquel 5.5 as well with
big success. So far I was able to run the following games on my gaming box
under Trisquel:
- Xonotic
- Darkplaces with the mod Kleshik
- Open Arena
- Ryzom
- Red Eclipse
- ActionCube

Specs of my gaming box:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2x2.7GHz)
4 GB DDR2 RAM
ALiveXFire-eSATA2 motherboard
Galaxy nVidia Geforce 9800 GT 512
Realtek-based PCIe 1GB NIC (since my mainboard NIC requires non-free
firmware)

I tested Trisquel 5.5 also on my old Shuttle barebone (AMD Athlon XP 2800+ /
GeForce 4 Ti 4400 / 1GB RAM) with success. I could play the less demanding
FPS available (OpenArena, ActionCube, Red Eclipse at lower details). This is
a tremendeous increase in regard to stability. The last time I tried Noveau
half a year ago, it instantly crashed after playing 2 minutes OpenArena on
the GF4. Pretty much the same applies for gaming on the GF9800. While
Darkplaces was running stable and quite fast with Mesa 7.11 under Knoppix 6.5
I experienced some graphical corruptions which do not exist anymore in
Trisquel 5.5.

While it might be fine NOT to recommend NVidia or ATI cards from a free
software aspect I find it actually pointless to do so unless there is a valid
option for AMD / ATI users. So unless Intel (or some other company -> I just
do not see any competition) does release a PCIe-based graphic adapter with
good open-source support, we need to stick to NVidia, since ATI cards rely on
non-free firmware files which are unsupported by the linux-libre kernel.

Personally I find it dangerous to buy Intel-based stuff only. Mainly for two
reasons:
1) Intel is still way behind the competition in terms of GPU performance and
features. I am afraid that it will stay like that for quite a while.
2) While AMD CPUs are often not so powerfull as their Intel pendant they
still provide a "better bang for the buck". You often get a 4 or 6 core CPU
for lower prices from AMD than their Intel pendant. I do not want to think
about what will happen with CPU prices again when Intel would rule the
market. We had this situation several years ago when Intel had fast FPU
performance (Celeron 400 and the alike) while AMD only had their crappy AMD
K6-2 with AMD 3D Now. It was awfull. Strengthening the market position of
Intel does to the PC market what M$ did to the operating system market.

Please allow me a few comments in regard to the 9500GT you sell:
1st: It is not THE CARD ! Why ? Simply because most cards in the same or
close GPU family will perform equaly in terms of stability. This includes but
is not limited to GF8600 / GF8800 (newer versions with 256 or 512MB RAM) /
GF9500 / GF9600 / GF9800). I would epxpect that even older cards from the
7000er family perform equally good. Of course older cards or those with lower
specs will perform a bit worse but I bet that some of the older faster NVidia
cards (e.g. 8600) will outperform even the latest Intel GPUs. At least if you
crank up resolution and/or details.

The 9500GT simply performs with Noveau at an identical level as the
propritary blob because the GPU itself is the bottleneck. One can easily
check out the Noveau benchmarks over at phoronix and it is pretty obvious
that mostly older, slower NVidia cards perform either identical or even
faster with Noveau. As soon as cards of a higher performance level are used,
you can clearly see that Nouveau performs at a much lower level compared to
the proprietary driver. Sometimes 3-4 times slower.

Personally I would have rather choosed a card with passive cooling and lower
RAM. 512MB is absolutely sufficient for the 9500GT chip since it doesn't have
the horsepower to push higher texture details and AA anyway. For comparison:
My 9800GT also has only 512MB and I was able to play Rage as well as Deus Ex
Human Revolution at pleasing details. A 9500GT would struggle here.

For those with enough money I suggest supporting Chris and buy the card he
offers. For those who are on budget I suggest having a look at used graphic
adapters with the chipsets I mentioned above. I bought three graphic adapters
over the last year (GF8600GT, GF9500GT, GF9800GT) from ebay and never payed
more than 20€ including shipment for them. Noisy, damaged or simply dusty
GPU coolers can be easily replaced by both active or passive models for
little to no money. I just mention this option again because I think a lot of
people also use Linux since it does not cost you any license royalties which
makes it the perfect OS if you are on budget.

Since most graphic adapters (if not all) are built in countries with a
oppressive government under bad conditions for both environment as well as
for the workers I think to some extent it is even more important to NOT
follow any new trend and buy new hardware every year. To some extent this is
the reason why I dislike buying a new NIC (USB / PCI / PCIe) for a "free"
Linux which does not support my hardware because of lack of firmware support.
I have to "free" my system by buying hardware build from non-free peoples in
non-free countries. But this are just my two cents on this topic. I am just
writing this since I think that you should not give recommendations on
hardware based on moral decisions. Keep it technical. Hardware XY does not
work because a binary blob is required while hardware AB does work, so sell
it. End of the story. IMO Intel is not "ethically better" than AMD or NVidia
and vice versa.

If it helps I can do some further tests with Trisquel and my 9800GT. I own
several native Linux titles (e.g. Amnesia, Shadowground, Shadowground
Survirors, Trine). So I could easily test them and give feedback if they
work. Those titles are non-free though but it might help people to decide
wether Trisquel plus a NVidia-based card is something they can live with or
not. Oh yes, and I could test other free stuff as well (Alien Arena, Reqction
Quake and so on). While the 9800 is of course not 100% identical to the
9500GT you sell, they still share the same GPU architecture.

Regards,
Holger

I hope Flightgear can be tested on whatever graphics card thinkpenguin is
offering as it doesn't work well with Intel cards:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/Intel_GMA_cards

Can you mine Bitcoins with that?

YEAH! The 3D acceleration now works! I tried it with 0 a.d. and with
supertuxkart and it seems to work properly. I have to thank the people who
developped the Nouveau driver, despite of the Nvidia opposition at the free
software.

I decided to test my laptop's Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M graphics card. It uses
the G86 chipset and is something like a cut down GeForce 8400. I installed
the non-free but native Unreal Tournament 2004 client to test a "big name"
game.

At my native resolution (1680x1050) the game exhibited terrible artefacts and
parts of the scenery getting stuck on the screen while moving around. At
1024x768 there were other artefacts with some parts, like some floors, being
rendered as black.

At 800x600 I could actually play the game without any corruption. I picked up
the Redeemer cannon, fired it into the enemies, got a "First Blood" and then
the game blew up and crashed :).

This laptop is from late 2007, but it was more than capable of playing old
games like Call of Duty 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Killing Floor, Red
Orchestra, Left 4 Dead, Company of Heroes. They used to run with good quality
levels too.

Despite crashing, at least UT2004 no longer claimed that I did not have 3D
support. I will also try to test some free games if I have time later.

No. This is a PCIe card for a desktop. The reason we aren't selling a card with an Intel graphics chipset is because intel grahics chipsets are designed differently. They aren't used in PCIe cards. That said the Penguin Libre already has a solid graphics chipset and there wouldn't necessarily be a whole lot of benefit in upgrading. In fact this card does not support video acceleration so in some respects the Penguin Libre's graphics chipset is better.

No. This is a PCIe card for a desktop. The reason we aren't selling a card
with an Intel graphics chipset is because intel grahics chipsets are designed
differently. They aren't used in PCIe cards. That said the Penguin Libre
already has a solid graphics chipset already and there wouldn't necessarily
be a whole lot of benefit in upgrading. In fact this card does not support
video acceleration so in some respects the Penguin Libre's graphics chipset
is better.

The older NVidia chipsets should work well. They aren't necessarily better
than the Intel ones though. There are missing features from the NVidia
drivers which the Intel drivers support.

There is no support. ATI's chipsets are dependent on a binary blob.

Support is non-existent. They are dependent on non-free blobs.

There is no support. ATI's chipsets are dependent on a binary blob.

Beside the dependence on the binary blob, the open-source radeon driver is really dog slow compared to fglrx. At least on an AMD E350. Even with fglrx the integrated ATI HD 6310 will perform at mediocre level. I would rather have a look at either laptops with Intel or NVidia chipset although some variants of NVidia (I guess they are called Optimus) do not work as stressfree as a normal NVidia GPU.

You might want to check out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus

Beside the dependence on the binary blob, the open-source radeon driver is
really dog slow compared to fglrx. At least on an AMD E350. Even with fglrx
the integrated ATI HD 6310 will perform at mediocre level. I would rather
have a look at either laptops with Intel or NVidia chipset although some
variants of NVidia (I guess they are called Optimus) do not work as
stressfree as a normal NVidia GPU.

You might want to check out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus

>It is not THE CARD ! Why ? Simply because most cards in the same or close GPU >family will perform equaly in terms of stability.

I'd generally agree with this statement. I'm generalising a bit here and factoring in various things. This card comes recommended specifically because it is the best performance/stability/etc combination that works with the free software driver for NVidia. You could say any GeForce 8/9 series card should work fairly well. In truth this isn't always the case and we don't have any way to produce a solid list of all the cards. Sticking to a specific set of cards/devices with specific chipsets is the best way to ensure adequate/better than average support. The resources to focus on a broad swath of cards doesn't exist and it is one of the reasons compatibility lists don't work well even when spread out across a large user base. So there are other issues I'm factoring in here.

I'll give you an example. In theory just about any N Atheros chipset for PCI devices should work well. So you would think you could purchase a random PCIe card as long as you made sure you had an Atheros chipset. The problem is there are many PCIe cards that are problematic although only on certain machines. Even where two cards share the same chipset one may work and the other not.

So yes- you can purchase a random card and it might work great. I wouldn't advise it though. Your choice in cards is a good example. While there is nothing wrong with the decision to purchase the 9800GT the 9500GT works better right now. And I'm in no way an authority on this specific issue. However, this is not my evaluation- we went to the founder of phoronix, whom writes about the subject intensely, has many cards, gets pre-release hardware, writes software to evaluate, benchmark, and test graphics chipsets/cards and the various drivers.

While I think more people should try and make decisions based on the ethical implications the recommendations / evaluations are not actually based on this. There are technical benefits from using only free software. Many of these relate to compatibility and support. Without free software we couldn't adequately or honestly claim support for the hardware.

I think you made a good point on the 1GB spec being overkill for this card. The reason for the 1GB spec is not a technical one though. Rather it was a business decision. One thing you have to understand about sales is spec's sell. It doesn't matter if a card is better/worse. If we were to offer a 512MB version you would likely see a negative impact on the sales. That isn't going to be good. It means we would be less likely/able to expand our offerings.

The plan of action right now is to see how this sells and then add a 512MB version if the demand exists.

As far as the 9800GT vs 9500GT goes the cards aren't sufficiently different enough to worry about it. If the 9800GT supports it with the nouveau driver so should the 9500GT (even if it isn't as true the other way around).

That said we could definitely use assistance evaluating games. While I'm interested in a compiling a complete list of compatible games in-house to better grasp the status of the free driver we won't list any games that are dependent on the non-free driver or games that are non-free.

The artwork does not have to be released under a free license. The software should be however. With that in mind the wikipedia link below contains a list of free games we would love to see evaluate (and anything else you know of which is not on this list). I'll add them to the product page and start a wiki page on our site if the list grows long enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

If you have to do anything special (commands, etc) we will add a page for it in our support section. If you guys have screen shots I'll add it to our site as well. The current software directory though that we maintain isn't yet available on http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/. There are still non-free components listed (mostly graphics drivers and things of that nature which can be removed). We have included in the descriptions to point out non-free package. To better coincide with the free software foundation we will eventually remove the non-free software listed and link to this page from http://libre.thinkpenguin.com instead. If anybody wants to go through it and list links which mention the software is non-free we will remove it from the directory. The libre link above right now links to the free software directory (maintained by the FSF). Our goal with our version has always been to implement a complete solution which integrated with browser plug-ins and similar. The point was never to duplicate the efforts of other projects like the free software directory or similar efforts.

>It is not THE CARD ! Why ? Simply because most cards in the same or close
GPU >family will perform equaly in terms of stability.

I'd generally agree with this statement. I'm generalising a bit here and
factoring in various things. This card comes recommended specifically because
it is the best performance/stability/etc combination that works with the free
software driver for NVidia. You could say any GeForce 8/9 series card should
work fairly well. In truth this isn't always the case and we don't have any
way to produce a solid list of all the cards. Sticking to a specific set of
cards/devices with specific chipsets is the best way to ensure
adequate/better than average support. The resources to focus on a broad swath
of cards doesn't exist and it is one of the reasons compatibility lists don't
work well even when spread out across a large user base. So there are other
issues I'm factoring in here.

I'll give you an example. In theory just about any N Atheros chipset for PCI
devices should work well. So you would think you could purchase a random PCIe
card as long as you made sure you had an Atheros chipset. The problem is
there are many PCIe cards that are problematic although only on certain
machines. Even where two cards share the same chipset one may work and the
other not.

So yes- you can purchase a random card and it might work great. I wouldn't
advise it though. Your choice in cards is a good example. While there is
nothing wrong with the decision to purchase the 9800GT the 9500GT works
better right now. And I'm in no way an authority on this specific issue.
However, this is not my evaluation- we went to the founder of phoronix, whom
writes about the subject intensely, has many cards, gets pre-release
hardware, writes software to evaluate, benchmark, and test graphics
chipsets/cards and the various drivers.

While I think more people should try and make decisions based on the ethical
implications the recommendations / evaluations are not actually based on
this. There are technical benefits from using only free software. Many of
these relate to compatibility and support. Without free software we couldn't
adequately or honestly claim support for the hardware.

I think you made a good point on the 1GB spec being overkill for this card.
The reason for the 1GB spec is not a technical one though. Rather it was a
business decision. One thing you have to understand about sales is spec's
sell. It doesn't matter if a card is better/worse. If we were to offer a
512MB version you would likely see a negative impact on the sales. That isn't
going to be good. It means we would be less likely/able to expand our
offerings.

The plan of action right now is to see how this sells and then add a 512MB
version if the demand exists.

As far as the 9800GT vs 9500GT goes the cards aren't sufficiently different
enough to worry about it. If the 9800GT supports it with the nouveau driver
so should the 9500GT (even if it isn't as true the other way around).

That said we could definitely use assistance evaluating games. While I'm
interested in a compiling a complete list of compatible games in-house to
better grasp the status of the free driver we won't list any games that are
dependent on the non-free driver or games that are non-free.

The artwork does not have to be released under a free license. The software
should be however. With that in mind the wikipedia link below contains a list
of free games we would love to see evaluate (and anything else you know of
which is not on this list). I'll add them to the product page and start a
wiki page on our site if the list grows long enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

If you have to do anything special (commands, etc) we will add a page for it
in our support section. If you guys have screen shots I'll add it to our site
as well. The current software directory though that we maintain isn't yet
available on http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/. There are still non-free
components listed (mostly graphics drivers and things of that nature which
can be removed). We have included in the descriptions to point out non-free
package. To better coincide with the free software foundation we will
eventually remove the non-free software listed and link to this page from
http://libre.thinkpenguin.com instead. If anybody wants to go through it and
list links which mention the software is non-free we will remove it from the
directory. The libre link above right now links to the free software
directory (maintained by the FSF). Our goal with our version has always been
to implement a complete solution which integrated with browser plug-ins and
similar. The point was never to duplicate the efforts of other projects like
the free software directory or similar efforts.

I actually went and tested it just to see. I'm definitely not the person to test a program like this. I haven't a clue how to work it and it isn't obvious like some games. I did manage to run through the tutorial a little and put myself in the air. Although I'm not sure if it was working properly. Properly is the key word here.

I actually went and tested it just to see. I'm definitely not the person to
test a program like this. I haven't a clue how to work it and it isn't
obvious like some games. I did manage to run through the tutorial a little
and put myself in the air. Although I'm not sure if it was working properly.
The properly is the key word here.

Yea- I also had a chance to install and start up Open Arena. Again- I didn't have time to rally play it. The game started and I moved around a bit. Looks like it is working. The trouble is unless you play for a while you don't know how well it actually works. It could crash, etc at some point in the game.

We based our call on selling an NVidia PCIe graphics card largely on various experts in this area (from kernel developers to the guys testing games, graphics cards, and drivers). They consider it sufficiently stable and ready for use.

It may not work with all games although it should work with at least many games. This is why we would like to get a list compiled of games that are compatible. Ideally users could then click a link to see details on the games, screen shots, etc and then another link to install. Newer debian derived distributions have a plugin called apturl included. It lets you link to programs in the repository. No need to open synaptic or a similar program and search for the game.

It is a really great feature.

Ultimately we want a customer to be able to purchase our hardware and know it will just work (this is pretty much a completed task), know they will be able to easily get games (work in progress), install programs (partially, although it needs some love), and access content without being a techy (a small portion of this is true- we have an entertainment guide for users). I'd say a huge portion of our customer base is in the "How do I turn this on?" category. If someone isn't showing them chances are they wouldn't figure it out.

Yea- I also had a chance to install and start up Open Arena. Again- I didn't
have time to rally play it. The games starts and I moved around a bit. Looks
like it is working. The trouble is unless you play for a while you don't know
how well it actually works. It could crash, etc at some point in the game.

We based our call on selling an NVidia PCIe graphics card largely on various
experts in this area (from kernel developers to the guys testing games,
graphics cards, and drivers). They consider it sufficiently stable and ready
for use.

It may not work with all games although it should work with at least many
games. This is why we would like to get a list compiled of games that are
compatible. Ideally users could then click a link to see details on the
games, screen shots, etc and then another link to install. Newer debian
derived distributions have a plugin called apturl included. It lets you can
programs from the repository to be installed.

It is a really great feature.