Laptop: ATI M. Radeon HD 5870 or NVidia GeForce GTX 460M?

Message

fklama · Post by **fklama** » Sat Oct 23, 2010 12:36 am

I am planning to buy a new laptop early next year.
However I am still a bit undecided about which graphics card might be the best and working well with Gentoo.
I basically have two choices:

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870
NVidia GeForce GTX 460M

I am planning to do a little gaming and quite a bit of GPGPU-Experimentation and coding with the GFX board.

your_WooDness · Post by **your_WooDness** » Sat Oct 23, 2010 7:07 am

Hi,

don't buy a laptop with a ATI graphics card. The driver support for linux is really bad with ATI. The Nvidia drivers for linux are well programmed and do their job and just work out of the box. Unfortunately it's not a open source driver, but if you plan to use your laptop instead of troubleshooting problems and getting the ATI driver to work, go for Nvidia.
Also if you want to do some GPU programming stuff, I think the Nvidia / Cuda thing is easier to start...

WooD

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Sat Oct 23, 2010 12:54 pm

The Gallium R700 drivers should be finished early next year.

If you go with a proprietary blob driver, bear in mind they usually ignore basics like rendering your desktop or text editor at a usable framerate and only bother implementing 3D fully. KDE and nVidia has been an ongoing problem for the past few years, for example.

fklama · Post by **fklama** » Sat Oct 23, 2010 2:39 pm

Does the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 work in 2D mode currently?
Since I am mostly interested in GPGPU-programming and a nice high resolution 2D desktop (I am more of the ratpoison or XFCE4 person), that would work well then.
I am planning to install a M$ Operating system on a seperate partition for those times that I can find the time for some gaming.
3D under Linux would be very nice, but it is definitely not a priority as long I can use the GFX-card for programming.

your_WooDness · Post by **your_WooDness** » Sat Oct 23, 2010 2:45 pm

Hi fklama,

I would go for the Nvidia card if you want to do GPU programming stuff. The CUDA toolkit and framework are good documented and I think Nvidia is doing a better job in GPU programming than ATI does.
With CUDA you have all the APIs and compilers for the GPU related programming stuff...

@Ant_P: you mention that KDE and Nvidia would be an ongoing problem since years. Well, I am using Nvidia and KDE for years now and never experienced any serious problems. But maybe those problems just did not come across with me. Any hints which problems you mean?

WooD

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Mon Oct 25, 2010 7:58 pm

your_WooDness wrote:@Ant_P: you mention that KDE and Nvidia would be an ongoing problem since years. Well, I am using Nvidia and KDE for years now and never experienced any serious problems. But maybe those problems just did not come across with me. Any hints which problems you mean?

These ones.

your_WooDness · Post by **your_WooDness** » Tue Oct 26, 2010 7:28 am

Hi,

alright there seems to have been problems with the nvidia cards and those drivers. But the article is not only about issues of nvidia but also about Intel graphic chips and ATI, where the ATI sections do have a lot of "todo" still...
Nevertheless, the driver version this article is about are rather old as now the nvidia driver is a 260.something and the drivers mentioned here are 177.something.

So you rather would go for a ATI card? I really do not have a lot of experience with ATI cards and the drivers, but if the drivers and tool-sets became better I'd like to have look at it.
The nvidia-settings tool is pretty good in my opinion. I have a nvidia card with HDMI output and connected my TV as second monitor. With the nvidia-settings tool you just active the HDMI interface of the card and the screen on the TV is active without restarting the Xserver.

And not to forget the GPGPU programming stuff: I think nvidia is the way to go at the moment if you plan to do some GPU coding.

WooD

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Tue Oct 26, 2010 3:53 pm

I've always had issues with ATi drivers, even in windows. I would never get anything but nVidia.

audiodef · Post by **audiodef** » Tue Oct 26, 2010 4:06 pm

Nvidia! Linux drivers appear to be more advanced for this than for ATI.

Post by **asturm** » Tue Oct 26, 2010 9:42 pm

The blob is more advanced with Nvidia, that is true. However, speaking of OSS drivers AMD has taken the lead some time ago.

But please: Don't call such things 'laptop'. Mostly stationary ergonomic nightmare, that's more like it.

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Wed Oct 27, 2010 12:09 am

genstorm wrote:But please: Don't call such things 'laptop'. Mostly stationary ergonomic nightmare, that's more like it.

I like that description.

Etal · Post by **Etal** » Wed Oct 27, 2010 1:59 am

Ant_P wrote:
your_WooDness wrote:@Ant_P: you mention that KDE and Nvidia would be an ongoing problem since years. Well, I am using Nvidia and KDE for years now and never experienced any serious problems. But maybe those problems just did not come across with me. Any hints which problems you mean?
These ones.

I thought that was old news...

If not, then would that mean that ATI has the best KDE support?

Intel drivers, for example are completely broken (at least for some chips like my Arrendale/i7, composited KWin is just plain old unusable):
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2 ... paces-4-5/

audiodef · Post by **audiodef** » Wed Oct 27, 2010 3:39 am

I'm not sure there is such a thing as "KDE support" for hardware. Hardware is supported by the kernel and/or drivers that have nothing to do with the DE or WM in use.

Etal · Post by **Etal** » Thu Oct 28, 2010 3:57 pm

audiodef wrote:I'm not sure there is such a thing as "KDE support" for hardware. Hardware is supported by the kernel and/or drivers that have nothing to do with the DE or WM in use.

KDE (or rather KWin) uses some esoteric features, which causes a whole lot of bugs in the drivers to surface.

I'm experiencing a problem similar to this, for example: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?p=169268#p169268

audiodef · Post by **audiodef** » Thu Oct 28, 2010 9:45 pm

Ah. Yeah, leave it to KDE to screw things up. They had a great thing going with the 3.5 series and some genius decided to dump it all and start from scratch. Nice.

Etal · Post by **Etal** » Fri Oct 29, 2010 1:24 pm

To be fair, KWin does still work when all the special effects that were not present in 3.5 are disabled.

lixo1 · Post by **lixo1** » Mon Nov 01, 2010 7:38 pm

Personally I used nVidia on my previous laptops, and it's good in terms of quality and installation.

Now, I'm running with ATI Radeon HD 5850 with fglrx drivers (close source), and the opengl quality is very good and better than my previous nvidia experience. But ATI proprietary drives have 2D accel. bugs, and actually acpi sets backlight to 0 during boot for my card 5850.