DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Jean Crystof]

Andrej Mitrovic Wrote:

> Notice the smiley face -> :D
> 
> Yeah I didn't check the price, it's only 30$. But there's no telling
> if that would work either. 

I can tell from our hobbyist group's experience with Compiz, native Linux games, Wine, multiplatform OpenGL game development on Linux, and hardware accelerated video that all of these tasks had problems on our ATI hardware and no problems with Nvidia.

> Also, dirt cheap video cards are almost
> certainly going to cause problems. Even if the drivers worked
> perfectly, a year down the road things will start breaking down. Cheap
> hardware is cheap for a reason.

That's not true. I suggested a low end card because if he's using integrated graphics now, there's no need for high end hardware.

The reason why the price is lower is cheaper cards have smaller heatsinks, less fans or none at all, no advanced features (SLI), low frequency cores with most shaders disabled (They've sidestepped manufacturing defects by disabling broken cores), smaller memory bandwidth, less & cheaper memory modules without heatsinks. Just look at the circuit board. A high end graphics card is physically at least twice as large or even more. No wonder it costs more. The price goes up $100 just by buying the bigger heatsinks are fans.

Claiming that low end components have shorter lifespan is ridiculous. Why does Ubuntu 10.10 still support cheap Geforce 2 MX then?