Looking for advice about selecting hardware for graphics and data visualization

[Shlomi Fish]

On Friday 24 July 2009 06:57:19 Omer Zak wrote:
> I am looking for advice about selecting motherboard and graphic card/s
> for a new PC which I plan to acquire; and about suppliers available to
> Israelis (whereas in Israel or abroad).

Well, of the three major brands of graphic cards for PCs:

1. Intel-based graphic cards are fully supported (2-D/3-D effects) with full-
fledged open-source drivers and more recently open specifications. However, 
they are always integrated on the motherboard and cannot be bought separately.

I've heard reports of Intel-based cards causing many problems with latest 
kernels and/or X11s, but I believe and hope these problems will be resolved.

2. ATI-based cards have the proprietary fglrx driver, and the open-source 
radeon and radeonhd drivers. The open-source drivers don't support 3-D effects 
on many cards yet (or at least didn't, last time I checked). I have an ATI 
Radeon HD 2600 Pro card, which I'm using with the radeonhd drivers and the 
system is rock solid. It does not do 3-D yet.

I had this problem recently: https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=51723 but 
it seems to affect nvidia cards too, and I was able to resolve it by disabling 
compositing.

Note that ATI have released a lot of specifications for their cards and 
actively support the open-source drivers effort.

3. Nvidia cards have the nv driver (which is technically open-source, but 
written in hex, and does not do 3-D), the proprietary "nvidia" driver (which 
has caused me and others many problems and continuously drops support for 
older cards) and the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouvaeu driver.

Nvidia has not released any specifications for their cards and are notorious 
for their general antipathy of the FOSS ideals. See also:

http://www.lockergnome.com/linux/2009/07/06/nvidia-chooses-windows-ce/

------------------

To sum up, I think at the moment your best bet is Intel with ATI being a 
second-best choice. Some ATI cards are probably better supported than others. 
I suggest you boycott Nvidia for their general antagonism and bad treatment of 
anything free software stands for.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

>
> My requirement for the new PC is that it is to render quickly graphics
> and data visualizations of large data sets, and to run under Linux with
> as little non-Free software as possible.  Ability to number-crunch would
> be nice, as well.
>
> The budget allows me to afford an high-end system (but not a
> supercomputer).
>
> If you have experience in the above, please write to the mailing list or
> contact me in private.
>
>                                                         --- Omer

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html

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