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56 Comments
- DarthBagel, on 10/11/2007, -1/+46This entire article can be summed up into this:
Nvidia or Intel = Good
ATI = Bad
How long has it been now since ATI promised decent drivers for linux? - tgunner, on 10/11/2007, -0/+21I think we all pretty much knew what the results would be already.
- opnickc, on 10/11/2007, -0/+13It's so weird, it was just a few years ago that AMD was awesome. Their chips outperformed Intel's Pentium line, yet were priced the same as the Celerons. With mainstream hardware makers fully embracing AMDs chips, I thought Intel's days were numbered.
Now, however, the only thing I'd buy of theirs is the ATI chip built into the Wii/360 (I know, different chips, both still from ATI though). Crappy video drivers (both Windows and Linux side) and the performance of Intel's multi-core chips give me little reason to buy from them. Never thought I'd say that 2-3 years ago when their chips were such a better value and the only consumer 64-bit chips on the market (sans Macs). - Felshadow, on 10/11/2007, -1/+14actually they promised better drivers for Linux just recently....except they always do that.
- trogdoor, on 10/11/2007, -1/+13Out of curiosity, how well does Aero work with these cards?
- Speed, on 10/11/2007, -4/+16Maybe they should make decent Windows Drivers first, since that's where most of their users are.
- bentrop, on 10/11/2007, -2/+14That seems to be the gist of the article, but sadly is far from the truth.
Nvidia's implementation of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap has one serious issue that Nvidia was perfectly aware of since the release of the 1.0-9xxx drivers more than a year ago and that still hasn't been addressed. GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap can only use the the grafic card's memory and not the RAM connected via AGP or PEG. With my Geforce 6600 with 128mb I effectively turn my Ubuntu 7.04 with Beryl 0.2 into a good looking copy of Windows Starter Edition - since it is almost impossible to have more than 5 windows open at the same time on my dual-monitor setup (2x 1280x1024).
All of Beryl effects are as smooth as they come and the current closed source nvidia driver performs quite well ... but what's the point if after 10 minutes of using Beryl every newly opened window will be empty or solid black? I pretty much only turn on Beryl when I want to show off, but I have to live without all the neat usability enhancement it offers if I actually need to get some work done.
Beryl would be a great tool if nvidia would finally bother to fix this problem ... - thenamestj, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12shoo...I had beryl running decently on an Nvidia mx 4000.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+10How long has it been since ATI delivered decent drivers for Windows? 2900 is superior in every way but it doesn't stomp the 8800 like it should.
- kazamx, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8 Thats an interesting point. I wonder how the same hardware running Vista with Aero effects would perform.
I hear often that Ubuntu (linux in general) is much much less demanding when it comes to hardware. I wonder to what extent this is true.
I found that performance jumped on my PC when I switched to Ubuntu from my old XP install. My uneducated guess would be it will perform = or better on the ATI cards but would fall behind on the Nvidia and intell cards. I would love to find out if I am right or talking out of my ass.
Can anyone do this test - aldenhg, on 10/11/2007, -3/+10I got decent framerates with Beryl on my Radeon 9800 Pro with the reverse engineered drivers, but I switched to Nvidia because 1: it was time to upgrade ans 2: I wanted to support a company that is actually working to make good Linux drivers.
- cantormath, on 10/11/2007, -4/+11I would not buy an ATI card til AMD Straightens things out with the drivers working on Linux......ATI is still SH@t......
- sinembarg0, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Ever since ATI stopped offering the control panel drivers and switched to catalyst control center drivers (and maybe even before) their drivers have sucked in my opinion.
- manogamez, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7I'm actually running Vista Business along with Ubuntu 7.04/Beryl and find that Beryl runs MUCH more smoothly than Aero. I was quite shocked when I first tested it.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the glass Aero interface can be exactly replicated in Beryl's Emerald theme manager with much less resource usage.
ATI x1300 - specialK16, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5"shoo...I had beryl running decently on an Nvidia mx 4000."
Please tell me how. I'm struggling with it. - jsleno, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@anarchytv
You are opinionated...and wrong too.
Exactly how will a "Second Life"-style desktop make anyone more productive? Why would I want to configure my new printer in a 3D environment right after I've already installed it in 3D REALITY??? Creating a new world is not the challenge. Creating a new avenue of productivity is. Bling is bling, but the spinning cube allows me to work on 4 things at once, instead of just one. I can spread out across 4 desktops instead of being constrained to one. That opens up more opportunities for productivity.
Also, any 3-dimensional "paradigm shift" type interface will still be limited by the 2-dimensional monitor display. Because of that, your hopes and dreams for a revolutionary new GUI are dead before they are conceived.
What you are asking for may well happen some time in the future. Until then, you are stuck, with with the rest of us, using either CLI, or 2-dimensional graphical interfaces. - PhireN, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7Beryl benchmark isn't that accurate, I have massive preformance problems when using its graphical display. With benchmark off everything is smooth, (execpt when there are way to many water effects) but turning benchmark on, rotating the cube causes it to drop to about 8 fps.
Also for some reason the fps would start to drop, constantly at 10fps/min until it reached almost 0. turning benchmark off would cause it to return to normal.
Always use benchmarks report to console option. - nukem996, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5u know I find it hilarious that my old Thinkpad T40 with an ATI Radeon 7500 runs Beryl almost as good as my desktop with a NVIDIA 7800 GT. It just shows how well open source code runs.
- cdmarcus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5@bentrop: right click on the beryl icon, Advanced Beryl Options, Rendering Platform, Force AIGLX. A little framerate hit, but it fixes the problem.
- stalefries, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Heh. I guess in that respect, Macbooks have you guys beat. :P
- robrichard, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5@jozer99
"Aero is actually a lot less graphically intensive then Beryl"
What are you basing this on? - mikewhite314, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I have the same problem. But perhaps the lowered framerates when benchmark is on are still proportionally less than what they would be normally, in which case it would still be useful for comparison
- zenazn, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Thanks for your wonderful insight and impeccable spelling.
- aaaaa, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4@bentrop
just add "--use-cow" to the beryl command line - JonForTheWin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3>Beryl would be a great tool if nvidia would finally bother to fix this problem ...
Wouldn't be a problem if they'd just give us the ***** specs. "Intellectual property"? I call *****.
Vendor reasons and excuses: the *****
"Intellectual Property reasons"
Patents? Patents don't matter
patents are open documents
or they are misusing someone else's patents?
Copyrights? no harm from using their documentation
Trademark law? does not matter
Trade secret? NDA only apply to person with the docs
Translation: vendor is lying
"Business reasons" / "Our secrets"
Counterpoint: The Taiwanese vendors are doing great
business giving us their secrets.
"Disclosure of bugs" / "Crappy engineering"
No vendor has ever given us this reason, but over time
we have come to realize this is the #1 reason
EVERY CHIP we rev-eng'd has turned out to be badly engineered - noamsml, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Does anyone know about the 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 HyperMemory (The one that is an option on the new DellBuntus)? They seemed to have skipped that line.
- XxUNDEROATHxX, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4I just installed ubuntu today and I was trying to install drivers for my 8800GTS with no avail.. looked on the forums, and there are no answers... Seems that the 8800 series and ubuntu don't like each other that much :P
- monkeyhero, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Beryl ran fine on my x800 pro, but it's definitely better and far easier to set up with an nvidia card. I'm glad I made the switch.
- pastaq, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2actually i got beryl to run many of its basic effects with a geforce 2 and a 1ghz proc. it wasn't super smooth but as long as yo don't use desktop cube or anything with particles (fire, beam up) you should do ok.
- cynicist, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2ATI just caught up and Nvidia is coming out with the G92 line for christmas. I'm disappointed in DAAMIT.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39829 - pastaq, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3@XxUNDEROATHxX
I have the 8800gts running beryl atm. its not great but after messing with the settings for the last few months i got it running fairly decent. Follow these steps and it might work. This assumes you have gnome and the x86 buntu.
Download the stable envy script. This ensures you have all the needed libs and what have you for the Nvidia installer.
Download the drivers from the www.nvidia.com click Download driver: Graphics driver-Geforece 8800 Series-Linux x84 Remember where you save this to.
If you want to try and run the envy script do manual install Nvidia and choose 9755, it likes to pick legacy drivers for the 8800 sometimes. If it works, great. If not you just set up for the next step
Log out and go to a tty (ctrl+alt+f1) and type sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
If you ran the envy script and it didn't work than you don't need to stop gdm.
cd to the location of the drivers (i.e.) $cd /home/user/Desktop
then type sudo sh Nv*
that will run the script. Choose yes on everything.
when you get back to gnome after a restart go into a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
copy and paste these sections over the same sections in your xorg. if the section doesn't exist put it at the bottom.
Section "Module"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "vbe"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
When your done restart x and see if you cant get compiz to work. if you can disable it and install beryl.
before you run beryl at its fullest do these things to get the best performance
go to your nvidia-settings under aplications-system tools and make sure synk to vblank is not enables anywhere. then run beryl-manager and go to beryl settings manager.
under general settings change texture filter to best, level of focus stealing prevention to extreme, uncheck detect refresh rate and set refresh to 200, uncheck sync to vblank. You might also want to go under advanced and enable workarounds for wine and legacy windows.
if that didnt work send me a message on the ubuntu forums username: pastaq. - Ai3d, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Question: Would Beryl Run at all on a Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu? MBP has ATI Mobility Radeon X1600...
- drunkard, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2That was a lot of buzz words.
- Schpariel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I had a Radeon 9250 before and Beryl/Compiz used to run fine on it, even with a lot of CPU-intensive processes in the background. I'm not saying that this benchmark is inaccurate, but I don't think he used the correct options for the r200 driver (HyperZ in DRIconf, etc.)
It's kinda sad when a reverse-engineered open-source driver performs better than the official driver. - Ai3d, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Never Mind, figured it out.. http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_feisty_beryl_ati_radeon
- Jozer99, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Opps, I made the mistake of criticizing Open Source Software. I apologize. All the pale, overweight script kiddies can stop trying to break down my door with their eBay purchased Swords of +2 Strength.
I base my assumption that Beryl is much more graphically intensive than Vista on the fact that Vista's Aero is doing little more than compositing relatively static textures (Windows), with a teeny bit of blur here and there. On the other hand, Beryl is doing all sorts of spiffy (and optional) effects such as "raindrops", or "flames" as well as the compositing. The reason that Beryl runs on older cards is because the developers decided not to restrict the cards that it would run on artificially. Microsoft made the conscious decision to restrict Aero to cards that have enough horsepower to run it at usable frame rates. If you don't believe me, try out some of the early Beta builds of Vista before many of these restrictions were created, it is possible to force Aero to run on a card that is far to slow to run it well. With Beryl, you can run it on pretty much any card with an OpenGL driver, even if it gives you 2 FPS. Which of these philosophies is better is not something I have the authority to say. - rory3, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Me too. It's damn impressive. Running PCLinuxOS 2007 on my laptop and enabled beryl and it's damn awesome.
Unfortunately I have a weird problem with "kicker" consuming like ALL of my RAM and making the PC unusable. That and KFTPGrabber doesn't want to connect to my server. I'll probably switch back to XP soo n though because I can't hibernate etc. - jacekpoplawski, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2This is well written article.
It describes open source ATI and Intel drivers, and does not follow stupid "buy nVidia for Linux" trend.
I really would like to see more articles like that.
It's important to be aware that there are good open source drivers, not just evil closed source one. - specialK16, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"I'm getting sick of cards that die after 6 months (5th one now, from Ti4200 to 7950GT)."
Lol wtf? I've been overclocking my geforce 4 (since I don't have money to buy a new one) for years now. It still works as crappy as when I bought it. - thripper, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1hmm ...
I'm getting about 100 fps with mplayer running on a Intel Pentium m laptop at 1024x768 with
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
anyways, smth fails miserably at times and the frame rate will fall to 3-4 frames , but it very rare, i can not reproduce it and a beryl restart fixes it.
CPU 1.7 Ghz ram 512m - garyl2k, on 11/27/2007, -0/+1http://www.freegifts4you.co.uk
- bmxboy661, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1was he dragged through school?
- KnightGeek, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Why can't my X1650 work? Also, why can't they just work through the ATI driver. It's been optimized by the GPU maker and is likely to perform better!
- JonForTheWin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Yes, with the proprietary fglrx driver atop Xgl (proper implementation is AIGLX). It's easy to get running if you know what you're doing. It takes about half an hour to get going if you don't know what you're doing.
It won't run to it's full potential (which is far more than you'd ever need to run Beryl) due to the proprietary driver absolutely sucking but it'll give you more than enough graphics power to push Beryl very hard. - dymaxium, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2One flaw in that logic though, old ATI is OK, new ATI cards bad until year's end or so ...
But that's about right other than that - manogamez, on 10/11/2007, -4/+4I know the article says using Beryl through XGL is not a path they endorse, but I'm using that exact setup with my Ati X1300 card and it works fairly well. It's somewhat difficult to set up but the results are well worth it.
- Tenoq, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3They make good cards, just not good drivers. Unlike nVidia, who makes good-ish drivers (arguable still, I know), but crap cards. As much as I like nVidia and appreciate them supporting Linux, I'm getting sick of cards that die after 6 months (5th one now, from Ti4200 to 7950GT).
- Wisgary, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1A little framerate hit? An unacceptable framerate hit, it's *****, I've tried it.
- crowsattack, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Bravo! I want to see support for ATI cards ASAP then people will change there negative attitude towards ATI. Very nice breakdown phoronix.
- MikeTheC, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Well, the hardware I've got (iMac G4 w/ GeForce2 MX 32MB, PB G4 w/ 64MB) clearly will never be up to the challenges of such high-end desktop effects rendering (not that I need or want them, to be perfectly honest), my own experience has been that PPC Linux distros have been a lot kinder on my hardware than Mac OS X with the Aqua environment. Of course, we're talking two completely different animals and I fully-well know that.
OTOH, since I can't get 3D-enabled drivers for these cards for PPC hardware, I've no idea how much better they could be if I could actually have 3D acceleration in Linux on my Macs. -
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