Originally posted by: sharad
ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP. I still have that card! This was quite possibly the worst piece of hardware I ever bought. It was ok in 2D but the thing had inexplicable freezes, hangs, lockups and reboots in 3D (mostly games), no matter which motherboard you put in. It was supposed to be an AGP 8X card but you really had to run it at 4X with fast writes disabled to get a few minutes worth of gaming. It hated VIA chipset and both ATI and VIA pointed fingers at each other for not following AGP specs. Lot of disgruntled owners at that time.
Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Man does this bring back memories. Did you ever seen an error like this when trying to install drivers? I always wondered what the hell was wrong with ATI. Did they even have a driver department? I can understand having terrible Linux drivers since nobody uses that, but I was using Windows XP which was basically the only operating system anyone cared about at the time.
The bolded part of your post brings up an interesting topic. My terrible Radeon 9600XT experience was with AMD processors that had VIA chipsets. Is it possible that all of the people who had positive ATI experiences were using Intel processors and chipsets? I always just assumed it was a video card problem since that same AMD/VIA computer worked great with GeForce 4,5, and 6 video cards.
Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Originally posted by: sharad
ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP. I still have that card! This was quite possibly the worst piece of hardware I ever bought. It was ok in 2D but the thing had inexplicable freezes, hangs, lockups and reboots in 3D (mostly games), no matter which motherboard you put in. It was supposed to be an AGP 8X card but you really had to run it at 4X with fast writes disabled to get a few minutes worth of gaming. It hated VIA chipset and both ATI and VIA pointed fingers at each other for not following AGP specs. Lot of disgruntled owners at that time.
Man does this bring back memories. Did you ever seen an error like this when trying to install drivers? I always wondered what the hell was wrong with ATI. Did they even have a driver department? I can understand having terrible Linux drivers since nobody uses that, but I was using Windows XP which was basically the only operating system anyone cared about at the time.
The bolded part of your post brings up an interesting topic. My terrible Radeon 9600XT experience was with AMD processors that had VIA chipsets. Is it possible that all of the people who had positive ATI experiences were using Intel processors and chipsets? I always just assumed it was a video card problem since that same AMD/VIA computer worked great with GeForce 4,5, and 6 video cards.
Originally posted by: adairusmc
S3 Savage 2000. Damn that thing sucked.
2nd place would be a 5900 Ultra. Not that it was a bad card per say, but I had a friend that had a 9800XT that would not work in his system but worked fine in mine and I traded him straight across. Then I knew what I was missing.
Originally posted by: Fox5
Originally posted by: SammySnood
nVidia Quadro FX Go 1400 in my Dell Precision M70.
This isn't entirely nVidia's fault. I got the system with this several hundred dollar ($800, IIRC) optional card for doing some light CAD/CAM work when traveling. It never was all of that and a bag of chips even under Windows.
When I switched to Linux (Debian stable) I found out that with this card I can:
1. use the Open Source drivers and have the operating system work beautifully but with painfully slow graphics, or
2. use the proprietary drivers to get fast graphics but wind up with all sorts of bizarre failures in various components of the desktop environment.
I have three other systems running the same distro. One has a cheapy ATI card, and two have Intel integrated graphics. All of them run rings around the vastly more expensive workstation with the nVidia graphics system. In Xfce they all use compositing with the Open Source drivers, and it flies. The nVidia system is slow without compositing, and a useless, drooling idiot of a system with compositing enabled.
In my estimation nVidia's decision to stay closed source for Linux is a real loser of a policy for their customers on Linux. And it's only going to get worse.
Your problem's might be from running debian stable. Debian stable is only suited for systems that require 100% up-time, unstable is still well-tested and far more advanced. Also, nvidia drivers follow the newest kernels.