[mythtv-users] Hope for ATI Cards???

[Greg Oliver]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> On Saturday, August 21, 2010 12:29:47 pm Douglas Peale wrote:
>> On 08/21/2010 07:41 AM, Brian Wood wrote:
>> > Not that I would suggest buying ATI video cards for a Myth system right
>> > now, but for those who already have them, this may bode well:
>> >
>> > http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/20/234248/Open-Source-2D-3D-Drivers-
>> > For- ATI-Radeon-HD-5000-Series
>>
>> This behavior is precisely why I have an ATI card in my system.
>> The lack of this behavior from nvidea is why they were not considered.
>
> Granted the nVidia "binary blob" drivers are not open source, but, at least up till now, they have simply worked better
> than anything available for ATI cards.

They still  _hands down_ outperform ati cards..  I have never had a
card other than nvidia until this laptop purchase..  luckily, I do not
do anything gpu intensive on it..

> Many Linux users do not completely understand what Open Source really means. Of course there is a lot of misinformation
> out there. I clicked on a "What is Open Source" link on the Ubuntu site, and the explanation started out "It is sponsored
> by Canonical...". I reported this to the Free Software Foundation, thinking they would be upset about such an explanation
> of OSS, but their response was that they didn't care about "non-free" software, though I did notice that page changed in a
> day or two.

Yep, that is a definite true statement for the _purist_ in
open-source/foss, whatever you want to refer to it as..  I _try_ to
support the movement when I can, but like all good things in life,
there are choices.  the nvidia module is a prime example - it makes
the linux multimedia experience very real. without it (nouveau, eg),
and you get the ati experience (well, as of 6 months ago)  :)

There are a lot of good people working on the radeon driver (ati
employees included - the 2 dedicated to the linux driver), but it has
a lot o ground to make up..  There are people that will swear their
lives to ati due to their windows support (I do not know)..  Also,
apparently this year they are a tad faster than nvidia..  All I know
is their cards *SUCK SACK* in linux...

I have a quad core hyperthreaded laptop, and it is just now able to
play 264 material with my 512MB ATI from 2 years ago...  I know - a
lot of it is the non thread-enabled x264 library..., but...