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

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 11:09:21AM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> 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.

I don't use nvidia cards without the nvidia drivers, so I really can't
say if the problem is the drivers or the card.  The biggest place I had
trouble was a P4 with a Via chipset and Via onboard graphics.  It was
rock steady, but slow with the Via graphics, but would lock up, usually
while rapidly scrolling through either a long web page or file in emacs,
with nvidia hardware and drivers.

On a different system with a similar nvidia graphics card, lockups are
very rare, but not non-existant.  The same system with an earlier card
would allow the system to be locked up over buggy OpenGL applications.  

A third case, the new C2D laptop with Nvidia 7800 chip and current
nvidia drivers that I've been using for about 2 months hasn't locked up
once. 

So, maybe I'm a bit too harsh about Nvidia stability, since it hasn't
been terrible, with that one exception, it just wasn't quite as good.