[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 @ 23:30 -0500, Joshua Boyd said:

> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 06:10:08PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> > Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > > Given how polarized ATI and nVidia are in the market, I'm a bit worried
> > > that we'll see a stupid standards war.
> > > 
> > > I'd hate to see it become hard to run nVidia graphics cards on AMD
> > > systems, or ATI graphics cards on Intel systems.
> > 
> > So would I, since I like AMD CPUs and nVidia GPUs.
> > 
> > (Then again, it's been a long time since I tried an ATI ....)
> 
> In my opinion, if you aren't using Windows, and don't need good shader
> support, then your best bet is an ATI card with free software support.

Probably true, although I wasn't very impressed with the free ATI driver
either.

If you need 3D and XRender support, you are just about forced to get
nVidia cards and use their driver.

Keep in mind, 3D and XRender are used for 2D application now, and that
usage is rapidly increasing.

X will be like Apple's system before much longer, and that's going to
put a lot of pressure on the graphics drivers.

> As I understand it, that means a x800 or less.  Anything x1?00 is not
> adequately supported by free drivers.  I found the free drivers with a
> ATI Radeon 9000 to be adequately fast and much more stable than either
> the ATI or Nvidia binary drivers. 

I found the ATI drivers unstable.

I find the nVidia drivers rock solid.  Any time they have a problem,
they take care of it quickly.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The strength of the Constitution lies
entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every
single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the
constitutional rights secure." -- Albert Einstein]