On 02/01/2010 05:49 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote: > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 22:31:22 +0000, > Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> You are basically listing hardware that is either inferior in performance or >> is going to become obsolete in a year. > > Obsolete? Not for Fedora. Maybe for playing the latest Windows based games > or doing some sort of commercial rendering. I think you are missing the point here. Fedora is admittedly a bleeding edge software distribution that does not support the bleeding edge of video hardware. How ironic is that? >> You are basically recommending that Fedora users buy inferior hardware, for > > And much cheaper hadrware. And possibly passively cooled hardware that is > quieter. (The 9200 was a really card for its time. It was inexpensive and > didn't need a separate fan.) And what you are saying is that someone can't get support for the video card in his/her brand spanking new computer that they just bought at the computer store....assuming it has the latest and greatest video card from whatever manufacturer. Weird. When I bought my laptop, I didn't worry about video. It was all supposed to "just work". I got stuck with a Radeon Mobility card. At the time (FC6), it required the fglrx driver to work properly for what I wanted to use it for. I wanted to play with MythTV and GoogleEarth. At the time, the ATI radeon driver did *not* support 3D. And this card was *not* supported by radeonhd. A year and some later, I upgraded to F9. I then had to wait 3-4 months for fglrx to work with F9 (and I missed the actual release because there was *no* big fanfare about it). Now its running F11. At some point I did convert from fglrx to the radeon driver because fglrx would no longer run on the new F11 kernels and the catalyst driver no longer supports my card (and my computer is not yet 4 years old!) The good news is that now GoogleEarth runs with the stock radeon driver, but I can't tell you exactly when that happened because there was no big fanfare about it when it happened. If this discussion hadn't have started up, I probably still wouldn't have known since the old behaviour was that when GoogleEarth started up, it locked-up the whole system, not something I would expect from a video driver! So, now it works. It only took 3 plus years to get support for a video card which was "old" when I bought it! What *is* the mean-lifetime of computer equipment these days? I can't say that I've ever used (for very long) a computer much older than 3 years old at work before it was declared unusable (too slow) and I got a newer replacement for it. If Fedora wants to be taken seriously, its open source video drivers must support video cards for what they are designed for: each new one is faster and more capable. If we can't use the newer cards capabilities within the limited lifetime of the hardware, it is a waste of time. The next capability I will want to use in a video card is VDPAU video acceleration, for which there is *no* support in any of the open source drivers, and is not currently a priority with the open source driver people. In fact, its not even on ATI's proprietary road map, yet. So, that means my next card will be a mid-high end nVidia card, and I'll use their proprietary driver, and I'll be able to watch high end digital video (H.624 and hi-bitrate mpeg4 stuff) on ATOM class processors! I can't do that today with today's hi-mid-range CPUs, but I can do it tomorrow on today's low-end CPUs with the new video cards. I don't need to play any high end Windows games. That's not why I want high-end video support. -- Kevin J. Cummings kjchome@xxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org) -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
