[SOLVED] hardware? technical question. developers?

[pooky]

so what is the best platform to be running beryl / compcomm on?

motherboard & chipset wise. onboard graphics preferably.

am i right to say that intel gfx chipsets will have problems for a while still?

beryl/compcomm is part of my purchase decision.

[Jupiter]

beryl/compcomm is not dependent on any particular
MB or chipset

it is dependent on a compatible video card
stay away from intel
go with an ATI or Nvidia
plenty of threads around here about that
i personally think nvidia is the most compatible across
the board
make sure to get plenty video mem,,, 256mb or more

[pooky]

thanks for the reply.

i was hoping to get a mobo with onboard graphics. i assumed nvidia, but i was hoping things had progressed further since a couple of years ago when i last looked.

is ATI actually usable now? it was god awful for so long.

well, within the nvidia family, is there anything preferable performance/compatibility wise?

[Jupiter]

thanks for the reply.

i was hoping to get a mobo with onboard graphics. i assumed nvidia, but i was hoping things had progressed further since a couple of years ago when i last looked.

is ATI actually usable now? it was god awful for so long.

well, within the nvidia family, is there anything preferable performance/compatibility wise?

There are some people here using ATI with some success but i don't think
even they would recommend using it. As far as nvidia, i would recommend
anything 6600 or above, with plenty of memory. A 7000 series with more
pipelines and memory of course would work better. I think most MB
with onboard graphics will have 6600 or 6800 though. I used a 6800gs 256mb
for the past year with compiz/beryl with great success. All plugins worked.

[LIGC]

Newer ATI cards are still a pain to set up, as they only run with the fglrx driver and thus can only use XGL. Cards older than the R500 can use the open source driver so they can use AIGLX. I'd actually bet intel IGP support is the easiest, as their drivers are open source and not a binary blob, so setting up with AIGLX shouldn't be too difficult.

[imnotpc]

I just recently posted a description of how to setup compiz on openSUSE 10.2. In there are fairly detailed instructions on setting up the fglrx drivers for ATI cards. http://compiz.org/OpenSUSE_10.2_Installation_Guide. I've setup compiz to run on half a dozen ATI cards without problems. My new X1650 is using a bunch of CPU at the moment (probably plugin related), but other than that there aren't any issues with newer cards.

[Xinef]

I am also trying to decide what kind of card I should get (I do not need much because I don't plan on doing games).
So Intel seems fine but not all effects and it can't be bought as additional card because their chips are onboard stuff.
ATI has experimental open source drivers (radeon) that work more or less, not able to get half the actual performance of the card and loading the processor for things such as scrolling in firefox etc...
Nvidia is providing decent close drivers that are conviniently regularly packaged by some groups (livna for my fedora box), performance is there, AIGLX and all plugins working fine (with no load on the proc), yet one ghost remains: the memory leak bug... now this is something that bothers me. If you just need to restart the X server to empty the card's memory, no big deal, you get a black window, you log out, log back in, over. Is that the case or you need to reboot your computer to fix things ? I won't be the only one working on this station and we might not reboot it very often, so I'd like to make sure of that. Of course, I would love to spend as little money on that as possible (I was thinking about a 6600)...
Any views are greatly appreciated.

[Jupiter]

i ran with a 6800gs 256mb until recently and i can't remember the
last time "end of last year sometime" i had a black window/screen
problem...
when i did though i think i just restarted the x server

nvidia has been spitting out driver updates left and right lately
too, and now that they are done with the new product releases,
i expect they will finally have more time to address this problem

[Xinef]

Well, I must admit that from the informations I found (and a bit of my own experience), nvidia seems the most appropriate at that time.
On the other hand I feel very sorry I have to get 256 MB video memory just so that it can silently get filled up by driver leaks... Why does it take so long for nvidia to handle a little incontinence ?

[Jupiter]

Well, I must admit that from the informations I found (and a bit of my own experience), nvidia seems the most appropriate at that time.
On the other hand I feel very sorry I have to get 256 MB video memory just so that it can silently get filled up by driver leaks... Why does it take so long for nvidia to handle a little incontinence ?


yea I and many other people in the nvidia forum are pretty pissed that they
haven't fixed this after MONTHS "and SEVERAL driver updates" of the problem
being reported

[SmSpillaz]

The intel i915 is usable here but you will not be able to do some of the more specky stuff like blur and distorted water as well as motion blur

[Jupiter]

so what is the best platform to be running beryl / compcomm on?

motherboard & chipset wise. onboard graphics preferably.

am i right to say that intel gfx chipsets will have problems for a while still?

beryl/compcomm is part of my purchase decision.


Heya pooky. Can you please let us know if your questions have been answered
and we can close this thread.
Thanks

[sonicbhoc]

The intel i915 is usable here but you will not be able to do some of the more specky stuff like blur and distorted water as well as motion blur


I can't do blur or motion blur but everything else including water works just fine over here.