Archive for August, 2007

Well, lately I’ve been having a little fun with my laptop that I got not long ago. It’s served me well, and has allowed me to work from it very nicely. The video card in it is ATI, and if you know me, you know I HATE ATI. Let me just give you a general idea of how much I hate them now after having this laptop.

If I wanted to run Beryl or Compiz from Linux… I might as well forget it. Between issues with my video card drivers and their lack of OpenGL support and the pure slowness of this video card, it’s nearly impossible. I had a bit of a hack going once using XGL and Beryl, but then I couldn’t use two monitors (LCD & External). So it was either a single monitor and sweet effects, or two monitors and no effects. *sigh* I also had Compiz working through Xgl, but wow… it was so slow I felt like I was back on a Windows 3.1 machine waiting for notepad to open.

Now lets jump into Windows… works great, until of course I actually want to play any kind of a game. Take for example, Call of Duty. Let me just list off the requirements by the game first…

• 3D video card with 32MB of RAM
  OK, great, this one has 128MB of onboard (not shared) memory, no problem, right?
• 700MHz processor
  Right… 2.4GHz ok? I’d hope so.
• 128MB of RAM
  1GB in this system, good to go.

So, everything major looks good to go, install the game, start it up… LAG. It starts up at 800×600 by default, and the game is already so choppy, I want to give up. Instead, I got online and found a couple tweaks so it was at least bearable to play… still laggy though. Apparently in Windows they didn’t complete OpenGL support for this video card in their drivers either. Now I’ve run into another problem… trying to play my Nascar Season 2003 game… for some *weird* reason it runs “fast”. Very hard to explain, but the timer counts anywhere from 1.5-3 seconds every second. When playing the game, it’s like playing in fast forward… wtf?! I can’t find anyone with the same issue, I can’t seem to do anything to solve it. I give up.

I’m offically signing off this laptop for any use beyond travel and other neccisary use. ATI, you *suck*. You can’t just make a video card, then fail to support it. The whole rundown with the linux drivers is, ATI doesn’t support the full capability of the video card, so OpenGL is useless. The open source drivers don’t know how to support it, so they’re just as useless. In Windows, well, I can only guess how that could possibly work. Anyway, I guess my reccomendation to you would be, if you’re looking for any kind of a video card (laptop or PC) … check out nVidia. Save yourself tons of headaches, driver wise and especially performance wise… BLARGH!