Jack Howarth wrote:
Does anyone know if DRI is fully enabled under the latestThat would depend on what do you mean by DRI. If you mean only the Direct Rendering Infrastructure approac of rendering 3D graphics, the answer is yes. Both closed source drivers from ATi and nVidia recently support their PCI-E products for Linux. If by DRI you mean the DRI project, then I could not say... I don't know if there's any board supported by the project in PCI-E "format" out on the market yet.
Nvidia and ATI closed source drivers when used with PCI-Express
cards. I have set up a number of Linux boxes with Nvidia and ATI
AGP cards and DRI has always accelerated nicely. However I can
find little information on the web concerning how well DRI and
PCIE play together. In particular, are there any limitations to
DRI support of PCI-E currently that would severely degrade the
performance of opengl. For example, the ATI fglrx drivers on
a Radeon 9600-XT improve in glxgears frame rate from 200 to 2000 fps
upon loading the fglrx kernel module. Will a similiar performance
improvements be possible with DRI on PCI-E cards? Thanks in advance for any advice since I don't want to get stuck with
horrible graphics performance under Linux just because DRI is
AGP-centric.
Jack
As for performance... As of yet, the improvement of PCI-E over AGP 8X is not very noticeable (it is arguable how much of an improvement in performance if percieved), general concensus say that it is not big an improvement over 8X AGP with the currently available products. However as PCI-E products hit the market and popularize, it is most likely that 16X and higher boards will be seen and then the difference should be enormous. For the time being though, PCI-E is more a testing ground and a glimpse of what the future interface for grphics and high bandwidth PCI applications will be.
I don't have much experience with PCI-E due to the lack of availability down here in Mexico, though in Linux for the time being, and as ATi irons down their drivers, I think your best bet would be to get an nVidia card. Right now from self experience I can tell you that ATi drivers are getting there, though they're not quite there yet (I'd estimate a year or so before we see the amount of performance equivalent products from nVidia offer in Linux from ATi solutions). The main focus has never been speed, but compatibility, stability and precision (again from self experience I can atest to the higher image quality of the Radeon cards on Linux with the fglrx drivers, though nVidia drivers are much faster). So in the end, the decision is yours alone.
Good luck.
