How well does Fedora handle ATI cards?

[gilpel at altern.org]

> gilpel at altern.org wrote:

> My coworker is also an nvidia enthusiast,

First, let's make this clear: I'm not an Nvidia enthusiast. Everywhere, I
read that AMD was supporting OpenSource as much as it could, but it also
seemed that, generally, NVIDIA drivers worked better. Anyways, that was
teh opinion of the store I dealt with.

They didn't mind if I installed Linux but it would have been harder to
bring back the video card saying "This and that doesn't work" if i had
chosen the one they didn't suggest.

> OTOH, I've had the worst time while trying nvidia proprietary driver

Everything works fine so far with my Asus EN9400GT: reading movie DVDs,
Flash, WMV, etc. I didn't experience a shade of a glitch.

>> I've installed Compiz, but are there other uses for 3D ? If not, if one
>> doesn't care about Compiz, I understand that Frank Cox says he had no
>> problem whatsoever with his ATI cards.
>>
>
> Yes - many games use 3D :)

My card certainly isn't a gamer's card. I made very clear when I bought it
that I didn't want to pay a cent more for a gamer's card. I said I would
be editing video, though, not professionally, just to see what software
video editing looks like. (Hence my question atop about LiVES.)

> Some media players can also use 3D acceleration to render video -- this
> could give you very nice features like antialiasing/deinterlacing/etc
> with low cpu overhead

>From what I read, compared to the ATI HD4550, my card asks more from the
CPU. The CPU being an AMD X3 7200, it doesn't make any difference: it
sleeps all the time. Whether this will be the same for video editing or if
the HD4550 would do better, I don't know.

But, until AMD/Fedora come with more up-to-date 3D drivers, I suppose the
salesman was right. If those Radeon drivers ever come out -- I have the
impression that similar stories have been going on for years -- AMD/ATI
will have an edge.