[Tfug] Most stable laptop video drivers

Zack Breckenridge zbrdge at gmail.com
Tue Jan 15 13:15:39 MST 2013


Assuming we're talking Linux here, so far I'm doing fine with an
AMD/ATI A8-4500M on a cheap Toshiba Satellite laptop (L855 series).
lspci says 'ATI Device 9903' for the graphics and the 'radeon' driver
attaches, with the 'snd_hda_intel' driver for the sound card. All of
this works pretty well so far with a max resolution of 1366x768 and
sound confirmed to work. Kernel version is 3.5.0.

My biggest problem with this thing has not been getting display
drivers to work however, but rather the wireless which is a Realtek
RTL8188CE. For a few months there, with post 3.x Kernels, I couldn't
get the wireless driver to work without a complete lock up of the
machine (not even a panic). It seems, however, that this driver has
finally been improved in Linux, although it still seems to drop a lot
of packets.

Zack

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Adrian <choprboy at dakotacom.net> wrote:
> Anyone have personal experience with the current crop of laptop video drivers
> on different platforms? My laptop is finally about to go kaput... I have been
> holding out for the last year and a half waiting for a non-HD laptop display
> to be back on the market, but it is still all the same HD crap screens.
>
> So, after filtering stuff out I'm basically left with laptops that have the
> following video GPUs:
> ATI FirePro M5950
> nVidia Quadro 1000M
> AMD/ATI Radeon HD 7570M
>
> My current/dying laptop has a ATI Radeon x1100 in it, which always worked
> alright when setup, but was a pain in the butt to initially get working
> correctly or upgrading the driver. Do any of the above just work
> out-of-the-box with X? From what I can gather searching around, it looks like
> the nVidia probably has the best support, the 7570M the least... Anyone with
> personal experience?
>
>
> Adrian
>
>
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