They can't even produce decent linux drivers for their current hardware (tearing anyone?). And I don't see any indication of change in the near future, meaning more crappy binary-only drivers of which we can only consider ourselves lucky if they even work at all...
At best things will sort-of work like they do now with inferior drivers. Excuse me if I consider that "next to useless" as I know you guys just can't wait to throw more money at them for doing such an appalling job.
Well we find that with the right motherboard/processor/ram combination and UI2 + Overlay the performance is very good. We are currently using this board and are very pleased with it http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/ASUS_P5N7A-VM
Andrew
And what exactly is wrong with UI2 + alphablending then?
...UI2 + Alphablending causes degraded mpeg performance... tearing during video playback. In addition feedback from our customers told us that they found the alphablended UI confusing and it reduced usability because of that. So because of both of these issues we currently never use it for customer systems... and would not even if the tearing issue was was fixed.
Andrew
So basicly the drivers suck...
But they work and they are what we have currently. Not using them or ignoring them is certainly not going to encourage better driver support. They may 'suck' but users can get excellent performance right now...as long as they dont want 'marvel' at alphablended images rather than actually see and enjoy their video content... most people I talk to seem to want the latter rather than the former ;-)
All the best Andrew
Yeah you get excellent performance as long as you don't use the only feature that sets them apart from other chipsets that do have open-source drivers and would therfore be much more worthwhile to invest in. In other words...
We actually get excellent performance. Period... as we would not use alphablending even if it worked flawlessly. By the way we build system that use Intel, ATI and nVidia GPU's... we use each of these GPU's pretty much equally (ATI possibly a little less than the other two currently) depending on situation/needs of the system were building.
All the best
Andrew
Yeah excellent performance, right up to switching to the alpha blended UI2, which is the only reason for going with nvidia anyway. Period...
Well as I said never use the Alphablended UI - so for us its just simply no an issue. We choose our motherboards/chipsets based on energy footprint, I/O, connectivity, fanless or Heatpipe cooling and the physical size of the enclosure we can wrap around all of this. I guess you'd call this a 'platform' approach to hardware...our goal is to build/choose components that deliver reliability and stability. We're 'agnostic' about which flavour of GPU we use. Our customers really dont care which GPU is 'inside'.
All the best
Andrew
Allright then, nvidia closed sourced drivers are the best thing ever, because your customers couldn't care less, I'm glad we could finaly settle this.
And you know, this reminds me of some other company selling lmce based machines too, who made a special deal involving closed source drivers too, didn't turn out so well for them in the end (or so I heard). Somehow their customers suddenly started caring when their machines stopped working as advertized because the drivers didn't work properly with later versions.
