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

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 4/10/07, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> 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.

Ah; I guess I was misinformed.

> 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.

As far as I can tell, beryl is more of a proof of concept at this
stage, which is why I only wanted to make sure the box we are building
is capable of running beryl-like stuff, since I do think this is the
future of interfaces. From seeing the development of Mac OS X, I have
begun to appreciate the importance of thorough-going implementations
of idea that, at first blush, do not seem strictly "necessary". So the
generation and display of PDF is basically a primitive in Mac OS X,
and this makes things so much nicer than they are in XP or any version
of BSD or Linux that I know of. Now that the OS X desktop is based on
OpenGL, essentially anything is possible (although not all things are
wise), and the presence of Core Animation as an API for anything that
moves promises to generate some impressive things (and not just eye
candy) down the line.

I actually find slightly translucent windows to be slightly useful, at
least when I have several terminal windows on the screen, but I know
what you mean.

> 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.

Indeed. I think the future will be more like Beryl, but not
necessarily Beryl itself. Gnome should be quite stable now, of course,
since the project is the better part of a decade old...

> 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.

I am trying to calm down an excitable eleven-year-old, so I am
sticking with your first story. :-)

jking

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