Google Won't Enable Chrome Video Acceleration Because of Linux GPU Bugs 295
An anonymous reader writes "Citing 'code we consider to be permanently "experimental" or "beta,"' Google Chrome engineers have no plans on enabling video acceleration in the Chrome/Chromium web browser. Code has been written but is permanently disabled by default because 'supporting GPU features on Linux is a nightmare' due to the reported sub-par quality of Linux GPU drivers and many different Linux distributions. Even coming up with a Linux GPU video acceleration white-list has been shot down over fear of the Linux video acceleration code causing stability issues and problems for Chrome developers. What have been your recent experiences with Linux GPU drivers?"
Permenant Beta (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like Google Maps??
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
They obviously mean "beta" quality. Google Maps is hardly beta quality, regardless of what they label it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Permenant Beta (Score:5, Funny)
What's not to like? Now I get new Google Maps that take several seconds to load in Chrome. That's progress compared with the instant loading that plagued the tile-map version...
Re: (Score:3)
The worst part is the Android app. It used to be pretty much perfect. Now it is badly broken.
I used it a lot in the car. There used to be zoom icons but now you can only pinch to zoom. Worse still when you pinch the map stops following your location and sticks to the centre of the pinch, meaning it is impossible to zoom while following yourself.
They got rid of navigation without setting a destination too. Most apps let you just drive around and use the map for speed camera warnings or seeing traffic conditi
Re: (Score:2)
I think Maps has been out of beta for years.
Re: (Score:2)
There was (is?) specifically a plugin for Google Maps to put a Beta logo on it, for those that miss the days it was in Beta.....
Re: (Score:2)
There is 0% Java on Google Maps?
And the previous Google Maps was 100% Javascript as well if that is what you mean't.
You should have searched for your room in the Hotel. The new Google Maps might have given you directions straight to it with a floor plan.
It works in many shopping centres around the world.
Re: (Score:2)
whatever it is it fucked up printing instructions two 3 different addresses
and why would I use google maps to find my room in the hotel, if i was already at the hotel? I needed instructions from the car rental to the hotel, it failed to give me that instead jumbling my searches together into one mass of retarded, the like of which I have never seen before, and hope to never see again, but here you are...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Permenant Beta (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they could. They don't *want* to.
What they do want, is for Linux to be a little more BigCorp friendly so walled gardens are a little easier to build and maintain.
This, by itself, isn't much of campaign, but every little nudge counts.
Re:Permenant Beta (Score:5, Interesting)
to me this all sounds like a lame excuse for the lack of quality of their own software. I mean it's true that there are bugs in the kernel and everywhere on X and alike, but all other apps play nice. only chrome is playing the "poor little guy" part. all other software rants and complains when they find a bug, but they still manage to work it out and to help everything get better. Linux is not the only platform having frustrating bugs that can cripple any piece of software. but it's the easy prey for anyone preparing to become a competitor.
this is the typical tactic of making people "dependent" on their software, then complaining that some of the platforms it runs on doesn't have as much quality to be excused for a poor performance so they can make it work worse and then they have another excuse to impose a bit more of their own platform like the one running on chromebooks or something else about to be launched.
Re: (Score:3)
What other GPU enabled software runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?
For starters: Every game that makes use of 3D and is available for the three platforms, scientific software like Paraview [paraview.org], Slicer 3D [slicer.org], 3D rendering software like Blender [blender.org], the famous video player VLC [videolan.org], ...
Re: (Score:2)
Typically, Linux applications work around bugs with various tricks and (mis)use of X calls (see Ilja van Sprundels talk on 30c3).
Perhaps a standardized test suite program that systematically tests all 3D features in order, in combination -- similar to the Acid Browser tests -- would help evaluate which GPUs are well supported in Linux/X. You know, trying to actively crash X in the most distinct ways possible.
Then people would be more pressured to make their drivers work properly, rather than saying "well,
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah but none of them work well in linux. Half crash, the other half are slow or glitchy. Let's face it, we're not going to get good 3D on linux until a) someone makes some decent drivers, and b) X dies.
You're full of crap.
For slow: the highest framerates in some games have been recorded on Linux.
The only 3D software I use regularly is blender, slic3r and minecraft (and varius 2D video players---not sure why you included them). They work flawlessly and glitch free on Linux.
This is not a surprise: it's an nv
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well I'm not surprised that you can configure a machine so that under linux you get good performance, but if you pick some decent and otherwise random hardware, chances are much higher that you will have slow/broken 3d performance if you slap on some reasonably popular distro, than if you go with windows.
It's a stock lenovo with stock ubuntu. No tweaking/hacking/configuring needed.
My experience with NVidia and Intel has been that it "just works" recently. In 2005, 3D was a bit flakey, but then it was a bit
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Permenant Beta (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, you got most of the issue correct.
I would add, however, that you missed a big one: hardware video acceleration in general quickly gets one into the world of DRM, patents, and other BigCorp-induced headaches that have been causing Linux trouble since day one. This has always been the major impediment to hardware acceleration in the open source drivers at least. Even the Linux binary drivers have had acceleration features stripped from the for DRM reasons.
As a Linux user for close to twenty years, I'd argue that the quality of the GPU drivers has improved remarkably over the past few years. For general desktop compositing and engineering 3D work I find the open-source radeon drivers work fine now; far better than they ever have in the past. Not gaming-quality yet, but improving all the time. This Google Chrome decision sounds more like the typical BigCorp excuse to avoid Linux support than a valid diatribe against the current drivers to me.
Google really cares about Linux (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ChromeOS, GPU acceleration always! Same hardware and drivers but not horribly tied to the Google Cloud? Nope.
Ensuring stability with their own certified hardware to looking at the whole entire Linux ecosystem is like comparing a mouse to an elephant.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it is more like comparing a dragon fly to a pack of dingos.
If Google dId care about Linux..... (Score:2)
they'd remove the blacklist completely --- and all the driver vendors would quickly fix the bugs (if there even are any).
As it is, no-one fixes the drivers because there aren't that many test cases showing the hypothetical bugs. And a good way to get those test cases would be with a frequently used app like Chromium.
By keeping the blacklist, it means those bugs they think are there will likely never be found and fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
they'd remove the blacklist completely --- and all the driver vendors would quickly fix the bugs (if there even are any).
Yeah, good luck with that... nVidia doesn't care about linux users, Unity is currently super buggy because of poor drivers.nVidia only recently started working on optimus support.
And using a laptop with an nVidia card is a nightmare, I constantly have artifacts, crashes, and things that misbehave.
On my work laptop I've disabled the nVidia card in BIOS, because I wouldn't get anything done using it... The result is that I can't use external displays etc.
The only graphics drivers that works on Linux is
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If Google dId care about Linux..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get this nVidia doesn't work on linux stuff. It's the only video card I've ever gotten to work, well not counting Intel which had until recently abysmal 3D performance. Two ATI cards returned because they just killed the machine but 9 years running Nvidia on linux. I think the problem with Nvidia on Unity is more because of Unity which is still pretty buggy.
Re: (Score:2)
Because that free product helps collect information on their real product. If their real product isn't using their free products, how do they have information to sell to about their product?
Not the same at all (Score:2)
ChromeOS is their OS on a hardware thay approved beforehand. Nothing to do with a random Linux machine out there.
Mine is working just fine. (Score:5, Informative)
Using intel i3 graphics with default driver that comes with RHEL6/CentOS6. I startup chromium with --ignore-gpu-blacklist. It has been more than a year now and so far so good.
Like the good ole days (Score:2)
I remember these types of problems in the early days of Linux, only then it was audio drivers. Getting audio to work was a disaster. Video typically worked ok but that was before nVidia and AMD were the major players. Now the tides have turned and audio works like a dream and video is what sucks ass.
I swear I've had more issues with video this last year than I did in the last 15 combined.
Re:Like the good ole days (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Video does not "suck ass". Google is just a bunch of whining crybabies.
Many of us have been happy as clams taking advantage of these features for years now on Linux. At least for Nvidia kit, it's pretty old news at this point.
The Intel and AMD variants may not be up to snuff yet but progress is being made. Google could certainly "white list" Nvidia without trouble.
As for the rest, they could allow it to be enabled for those that are really determined to take the risk. That might even help improve the quality of those other offerings.
They can't be stressing things any harder than Valve.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When MS was developing their GPU acceleration for IE, it was a complete shitshow. Tons of very common drivers (the current ones for about half of the at-the-time dominant GeForce 8x00 series, if I remember the story right) were buggy, and would either cause glitches or just not render anything at all. A few others failed in other interesting ways, including crashing the browser.
They were able to get on NVidia's case and demand updated drivers that weren't shit, at least for that particular application. Goog
Re: (Score:2)
but that was before nVidia and AMD were the major players.
Who were the major players?
Re:Like the good ole days (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
S3 was also quite big and lots of vendord (diamond, for one) used their chips a lot.
matrox was also big. I owned many matrox cards for linux 2d use, including multi-head (before MH was mainstream).
Re:Like the good ole days (Score:4, Funny)
In other news. Twitch Plays Pokemon beat the game in 18 days. Meanwhile Linux GPU driver support is still shit.
Re: (Score:3)
Next challenge: TwitchTV codes kernel drivers.
Im expecting great things.
What's the solution? (Score:2)
Is this really something that's best fixed by expecting Nvidia/ATI/Intel to release higher quality drivers for every distro? Or is this a distro problem, where LInux will simply never have ability to handle acceleration very well because it's a constantly-moving target?
It's an honest question. I'm curious to see what people involved with either Linux or GPU drivers thinks.
Re:What's the solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
AFAIK the Mozilla folks have not had the same complaints about Linux graphics drivers, have they?
The solution is to avoid using the Google Chrome browser, unless you like being spied on all the time by Google. Load up Firefox with a completely fascist set of add ons and do your best to browse safely.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the correct solution. Been on FF since Opera abandoned the Linux community last year (saw the writing on the wall with the yet-to-be-released Linux version of their Blink browser -- not that it even matters since all functionality that I loved Opera for died (or will die) with 12.x). Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised with how fast it's become vs. the last time I used it [on linux], which was around 2009/2010. Still not as fast as Chromium or Opera, but fast enough to do the job without wonderin
Re: (Score:2)
I really just don't see why anyone would use Chrome. I never did get it. IE comes default with windows... so you use it if you're too lazy or don't know what you're doing you leave it on there... Opera has some neat, unique features... so ok... But Chrome? Really? What positive purpose does it serve? Firefox has had its issues over the years but time and again it's proven to be the most stable, most user friendly browser over the long term.
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience it's faster WRT opening, new tabs, etc. Also FF was hogging memory pretty badly for me. Keeping FF open for a few weeks would invariably result in it using more and more memory, and eventually need to be restarted.
Re: (Score:3)
Same with Chrome. Same with all browsers.
Chrome's process per tab model keeps it from having quite as much memory go to what Wikipedia calls "external fragmentation" and Firefox's about:memory page calls simply waste. These are pages that can't be decommitted because they have at least something left in them. Mozilla is pushing Firefox toward process-per-tab, but the Electrolysis project isn't quite done yet.
Also, you're doing it wrong. What website do you need to keep open for weeks on end that can not be bookmarked or session-saved?
Pages to which I expect to be able to refer while my laptop is disconnected from the Internet, such as while riding the city bus or while ins
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox has had its issues over the years but time and again it's proven to be the most stable, most user friendly browser over the long term.
I think I switched from Firefox to Chrome at around 2010. At that time, Firefox was definitely not the most stable or the fastest browser out there, chrome was.
Switching back hasn't really been something that I'm willing to invest the time in at the moment, as it's easy to just download chrome, log in, and then have all your extensions, bookmarks, etc. come back to you.
I understand Firefox does that now, but it still requires me to find extension equivalents and migrate the data which frankly isn't worth th
Re: (Score:2)
Why did I chose Chrome over Firefox? Because I got sick of the memory leak problems under firefox. When I browse, I use a shit-ton of tabs. After about 3 days, firefox is consuming over 1GB of memory even after I close every single tab. If I let it go about a week, it's up to nearly 2 GB. Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds. I went through year after year o
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and then when you reload all of those tabs:
1) oops, those ones don't reload because you have to log back in, and then you lose your context
2) oops, those other tabs use server side sessions which are now expired, so the page is no longer valid and can't be reloaded
3) oops, any pages that have any complex script state need to be put back into the proper state
Not to mention that just closing the browser takes it like 5 minutes to unallocate its 2 GB of memory.
Seriously, why do you seem so upset that I've
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and then when you reload all of those tabs:
Never mind that 10 of them are paused youtube videos that I will have to locate and pause again
Re: (Score:2)
The question was asked: "I really just don't see why anyone would use Chrome...What positive purpose does it serve?". I was simply answering. Isn't that what we do here in slashdot discussions?
As for any denial, there's nothing for me to be in denial about. I've been using chrome as my primary browser for (I'd guess) approximately 2 years now and I've never had cause to complain about it. Like I already acknowledged, memory footprint is probably the big issue people complain about with Chrome, but that's a
Re: (Score:2)
It's kind of funny you didn't even bother to read my post carefully before responding
Firefox: " Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds"
Chrome: "Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory...Despite that, performance is still perfect."
Clearly from my post, I don't care very much how much memory the app uses. It's the fact that, as firefox grows in memory size, it beco
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
AMD releases their specs... the Catalyst driver may not be open-source, but the open-source radeon* drivers are usually not far behind it.
Steam/GoG/HB (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> Every linux distro has a different driver with a different level of support for the specific revision of the specific card a user has.
You mean like anyone with a Windows box?
Linux distributions are just collections of upstream projects. That includes the kernel, the user land, and anything else.
Someone comparable to myself either has some version of the kernel or the Nvidia blob drivers. That's the official driver from the hardware vendor. I might have a different version than someone else, but that ha
Re: (Score:2)
Regarding GoG a lot of the games they sell are DOS games which run on DOSBox or ScummVM. You can just extract the files and run those under Linux DOSBox or ScummVM just as well.
Bullshit! (Score:5, Informative)
Simply enable it for NVIDIA users by default. It works the same across every distribution, and in fact, every OS. Google are just as cowardly as Adobe were.
For those who want faster flash and faster Chrome, try this:
* Go to chrome://flags
* Override software rendering list -> Enable
Welcome to a faster Flash and faster Chrome :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is what we get when the journalists get ahold of some technical info and start waving it around with the safety off. I assumed from reading the summary that even if the functionality was "permanently disabled", if the code was already built into the browser, you would just have to find the right bits to twaddle in the binary to enable it. Although I guess that is indeed "permanent" for the vast majority of users.
Re: (Score:2)
Browser: Chrome 33.0.1750.146
OS: Linux Mint 15 ("Olivia"), kernel 3.8.x
GPU: Intel i965
OpenGL Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.1.7
Mind you, if I only turn on HW acceleration in the advanced settings panel, GMail runs sluggishly. If I also then enable your software rendering override, then GMail appears to run normally, but in both cases I still get the sluggish Jira pages. I'
Re: (Score:2)
Then you take off your Linux Zealot glasses and compare it to OS X or windows, you find that Google is probably right to not release GPU acceleration. I have found off and on that we get a lot of silly glitches happens with GPU acceleration, artifacts are common, values not moving at the right speed... For the advanced user, we know how to deal with it, move a component etc... but for an end user it could be a major issue, and turn people off to the product, and it is better off going without until it works
If only... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
*points at summary*
I agree - the linux GPU support is broken (Score:2)
In 2 words: THEY SUCK.
I had to abort a windows to linux port because the intel linux graphics driver is BROKEN (Intel Atom N455). I spent weeks convincing a customer he was better off moving his code base to linux, and when I finally got the OK to build a prototype, the UI was unusable. I really wish the GPU manufacturers would provide enough documentation so the Open source ppl could come in and fix it.
Re: (Score:2)
Other commenters are right: This is not about stability. It's more likely about DRM.
Re: (Score:2)
wow. what an incredibly impressive rant. I always love when my competence is brought into question by an anonymous coward.
FYI, my linux port DOES work, just not on the specific platform that the client initially chose. I offered to explore this cost reducing move, which was progressing swimmingly until i hit this linux/intel/qml opengl incompatibility.The only downside was I spent some of MY time exploring the options, and we now need to stay running Windows Embedded for a little longer, until we can quali
Linux drivers are fine (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Linux as my primary OS for 10 years. My desktop PC does dual boot into windows for a few games but spends 95% of the time in Linux. I've done a bit of gaming and other graphics intensive applications under Linux without any problems. As a part time gaming machine, there is a mid range NVIDIA card hiding inside and I've always used the proprietary NVIDIA drivers which are as good as those on windows. There was a time when installing those drivers was a bit of a pain, due to other developers trying to to force their extremist political views on users, but it is a very simple process now.
Some drivers might have problems but there is no reason they couldn't take the same approach as Firefox developers: provide a user controlled, easily accessible, option to enable hardware acceleration... Maybe that last point shows why I don't care what Google does with Chrome on Linux or any other platform... Firefox works for me on Linux, Windows and Android.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. I've been using Linux on the desktop since 2008-ish, drivers have been solid since right around 2010 in my case, though I can only speak for NVIDIA since that's been all that I've run in that span.
Re: (Score:2)
I've used FF/Chrome side by side on Linux... you FF people are fooling yourselves. It is by far the clunkiest, slowest, least responsive browser out of the big 3.
I've permenantly disabled chrome. (Score:3)
Not having flash in chromium was one of the many straws. This doesn't help.
I used to use a Chrome/Firefox combo to segregate my browsing/cookies. Just switched to multiple firefox profiles and added a "Close Tabs to the Right" plugin (to restore the one thing I missed about chrome). Much happier and I doubt I'll ever go back.
It's more like google can't write code.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Why did Steam need their own distro?
Re: (Score:2)
And yet I run stable bioinformatics servers and workstations on Fedora. I use opensource RadeonSI on workstation and home theater.
Somewhere your system got borked.
Google indirects to Linux (Score:2)
What's the saying any problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. Guess they can't figure out how to monitize contributing coding resources to address the issue.
Not my experience (Score:2)
I've a fresh install of Mint 16 here on a Thinkpad with an AMD RV710 and the Mesa driver seems to be working fine. Steam games & Netflix work a treat. I haven't installed Chrome, though, it's performance my suck but Chrome is easily avoidable.
I've never understood this (Score:2)
I understand that drivers == performance == competitive advantage, so the vendors want to keep SOMETHING secret, but hasn't the state of the art advanced quite a bit beyond what the vast majority of people need? Can't the vendors just release a plain-vanilla, rock-solid, super-basic driver that offers 90% of the performance? Or hell, even 50%? I mean, if I somehow managed to run Linux on a 75 MHz Pentium with 1 MB onboard VRAM in 1998, surely I should be able to expect *some* acceptable level of performance
Re: (Score:2)
especially with how Windows 8 is doing.
You do realize that Windows 8's failure doesn't really change anything for Linux, right? As usual, Microsoft is fighting against its own past: people are choosing between sticking to 7 or moving to 8, Linux almost never enters into the equation.
Google: How about test code? (Score:2)
If Google is so confident that it is driver bugs causing issues, then I'm sure they can put together test code to test for and expose the bugs. In other words, instead of complaining, give the vendors code that will show them the issues and allow them to resolve them. You don't have to cover every issue - just share the code you intend to use and let the vendors fix their drivers - OR - show you where your own code is responsible.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much every successful video game developers do just that... The bugs get fixed...sometimes....someday....maybe....if the stars are aligned...
Realistically, coding against video drivers (regardless of platforms) feel like web development, where you have to fight over countless (well documented ) bugs on each implementation until you're blue in the face, and if you're lucky, 5 years down the road, it will get fixed.
Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
This is all part of a cunning plan to have Android and/or Chromium enter the desktop/laptop market. Start by denigrating your target.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OS X is not based on linux
FreeBSD != linux
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
still I cannot explain why on Windows in a virtual machine (Linux as host) the sound is better than in Linux itself.
I suspect the Linux builds of Skype don't have all the good audio codecs they've added to the Windows build, Skype now being a Microsoft product. The audio quality is total ass.
Re: (Score:3)
God help you if you are dealing with EFI or UEFI.
How would EFI or UEFI change anything?
EFI or UEFI will change things at firmware boot time, but actual run time/OS usage should be the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Things change at firmware boot time, that affect the OS from that point forward. The linux ecosystem is catching up to (U)EFI, but for my slackbook pro, I get no 2d/3d acceleration in EFI mode, because the video BIOS gets disabled. X11/DRM/Mesa requires the video BIOS for hardware acceleration. You can either patch ELILO (which does NOT boot on ia32 Macs anyway), use fakebios, or boot using CSM (legacy BIOS emualtion). At least that way I get 2D/3D, but CSM breaks a host of other shit, so it's no better really.
That's.... kind of insane.
OS X/Macs don't have those problems, and it's not even designed to be used with non-EFI cards. You may not get video at firmware time, but as soon as the video drivers load they'll find the card and not care if it's EFI or BIOS.
I don't know enough about PCI-E to know why that is, but I'm assuming all that needs to be done is the driver needs to match to a specific PCI-E card id, and then tell the card to start. No UEFI or BIOS involvement, beyond what could possibly just be the sys
Re: (Score:2)
In the briefest terms, AMD/ATI = Hard Mode, or so it appears.
Most recently, it took me a significant part of a weekend to setup a GPU-based Dogecoin miner on Debian, using ATI cards. The first and most painful lesson was learning tha
Re: (Score:3)
Doesn't it suck when you use products from companies that are borderline hostile to their customers on a given platform?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the display. It's the codec and resolution of the video. The size you of the screen you are going to display it on has squat to do with what it will take to decode the video.
For 720p or 1080p h264, this can be considerable. Add h265 into the mix and you've just added a whole new world of hurt.
This allows machines that can't even run Windows anymore to deal with any video that you could throw at it.
Even if you do have the CPU for "brute force", using speciality silicon on the GPU is probably more ef
Re: (Score:3)
given that CPU horsepower today is good enough, and tomorrow will be more so. Besudes how much video power do you need for your typical low-rez linux display.
So you are fine with Linux requiring gobs of CPU horsepower and delivering low video performance? Then it is technologically worse option than Windows. Windows lets me squeeze more out of my hardware. Why would I use Linux anymore then?
There was a time when I used Linux precisely because it was the faster option and gave me more power. There are still good reasons to use Linux. But this unoptimized bloated software is really starting to now appear everywhere on Linux world. Not good.
Performance is a top thi
Re:What have been my recent experiences? (Score:5, Insightful)
linux drivers suck for all 3
Don't tell Valve! You'll ruin there latest business model!
Seriously, I've used GPUs from all three manufacturers and found every Intel and nvidia hardware/driver combination I've tried to work well in Linux, and every AMD combination to be the opposite. I wish it were not so, but it is, in my experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Somehow Intel is able to do this but AMD is incapable of writing decent drivers. Great hardware is useless without software which is why I don't own any AMD gear and with the exception of an old PowerMac 9600 never have. I do use Nvidia and put up with their closed drivers on Linux because they do at least function unlike AMD's.
Re: (Score:3)
The intel HD3000 onwards are not horrible, especially if you are comparing on performance per watt, which is the way the market is headed. The traditional desktop is dying - admittedly a long and protracted death.
Re: (Score:2)
I've never felt compelled to bother with such a setup. I have a rather large monitor. Dunno if I have room for another one like it. On the other hand, the whole "virtual workspace" thing seems to already accomplish a lot of what other people use multiple monitors for.
Perhaps someday when I am REALLY bored I will buy a couple of cards high end enough for this to matter and horse race both operating systems.
Re: (Score:2)
Quit confusing the issue with facts.
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome OS is sold on machines using ARM procs. to power the system. Which of them are using AMD or Nvidia GPU's and drivers?
Re: (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that I've been using Nvidia for almost a decade and I see none of these problems either. I keep hearing people ranting about linux sucks and 3D on it is broken while I happily keep rolling on. Either I'm smarter than I think or a lot of them are trolling. Regardless Google can suck my dick. I support those who support me. Chrome isn't that special anyway. Sure it's faster. I've seen that but it's not like it's 30,000% faster. I can give up a millisecond or two not to put up