Laptop choices

Marwan Burelle burelle at lri.fr
Wed Nov 23 11:01:17 GMT 2005


On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 04:01:25AM +0100, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
> >Mmm, the radeon man page claims Radeon 9000's are supported without 
> >caveats.
> 
> Oops, I sent my initial reply off-list. To summarize for everybody else: 
> Yes, you're right; I was thinking the Radeon 9000 was a newer chip, 
> while it is an oder one (an rv250), which has been fully supported for a 
> while. Sorry for the noise.

Just a comment on ATI chips ... 

Older one have a "full" support, with 3D, but the libGL provide is the
generic one from Xorg (and Mesa, if my memories are right) and doesn't
provide realy good performances with those cards.

Having good performances with hardware acceleration depend a lot on
the libGL part (to be short, libGL provides high level
functionnalities that needs to be built upon hardware facilities, the
way this functionnalities are built is as important as the hardware
facilities provide by the video card.)

On the subject some times ago, a survey/benchmarks of video card under
X (with Linux and FreeBSD) against Windows was post to some forum, it
shows that ATI chips perform badly with X drivers/libGL (whereas the
binary driver was almost unusable even for running glxgears under
linux and unusable at all under FreeBSD.)

So, yes, you may have full support, but you won't see the difference
for 3D accel (I have an ATI card fully supported, when hardware accel
becomes available for me, it doesn't realy change anything ... )

My 2c.

-- 
Marwan Burelle,
http://www.lri.fr/~burelle
( burelle at lri.fr | Marwan.Burelle at ens.fr )
http://www.cduce.org
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