Re: [MLUG] good video card choice to run Beryl?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Jonathan King wrote:
> There appears to be a whole mess of Nvidia drivers out there and
> support for some specific chip sets is apparently patchy. You're also
> doing this under FreeBSD, so there might be some issues with
> interfacing the (Linux-only, I think) drivers with your system. And I
> am guessing that is relatively less fun than playing around with one's
> beryl desktop...
In fact, nvidia support for FreeBSD is extremely good.  FreeBSD now gets 
new drivers at the same time as Linux.  It wasn't always this way, but 
nvidia seem to have responded very positively to grass roots activism.  
Interfacing the Linux drivers is effectively impossible, at least I 
hadn't heard of anyone succeeding.

As for the fun of playing with beryl, I have to say that it is rather 
short lived.  You quickly tire of the eye candy, and it is hard to find 
a really practical use for the translucent windows.  Another problem is 
that it does use up the CPU/GPU cycles a very great deal - for example, 
my non-GL screensaver turned into a real CPU hog.  Beryl is a relatively 
new project, and it doesn't seem to have quite the kind of stability 
that I am seeing with Gnome.

Let me also take back a little of what I said earlier - I think that the 
5200 does OK with beryl, but in certain extreme circumstances I noticed 
performance issues which were absent in the 7600.  Not enough to warrant 
paying the extra money, but there is a difference which is observable if 
you look closely.


Stephen


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