I am in the process of looking for a new desktop PC. I am trying to decide between and ATI or Nvidia card. I am not a gamer so that doesn’t matter to me. My question is, even though at this point it really doesn’t matter, in the future… Which do you think will have the best change of having the more complete support? ATI (more open source friendly) or Nvidia (with the Nouveau driver). I am more interested in which will stand the better chance of supporting things like OpenCL or whatever the Nvidia equivalent would be. I also would like to know if I buy a PC that has more then 2gig of memory on it will Haiku work, and if it will what does it do with a system that has more then 2gig of ram?
Thanks in advance
David
Hi DFergATL!
Predicting the future is always tough… 
If that future means 3D acceleration through gallium3D, there’s was this haiku-dev thread. While Zenja has been working on the Nouveau driver, he states that once all is there, a RadeonHD driver shouldn’t be that difficult to add either. Nobody knows however, when Gallium3d support will actually hit. So, where does leave your decision today? I’d say get a cheap supported card today, maybe even second hand, like a NVidia 7x00 and shop for better 3D card when Gallium on Haiku is ready. You’ll save money today and get more bang for the buck in the future.
I think Haiku currently supports 4gb of RAM (minus RAM mapped by the graphics card), see also Ingo’s comment from earlier this year. I think there has been some work done on PAE, but no breakthroughs yet.
All RAM above this “memory-barrier” will simply be ignored.
Regards,
Humdinger
Impossible to predict which graphics driver will be developed for Haiku in the future. Depends on graphics developer(s).
Right now, Geforce7 series and older is best supported.
You should hold off getting any newer graphics card until a graphics driver is actually available for it. Best to go with onboard video or older graphics card for now.
Haiku has implemented PAE. It works with 4 GB on my laptop. Seems to give more memory to the OS than previous versions of Haiku. The non-PAE Haiku versions would give 3 to 3.5 GB RAM on 4 GB system - make less RAM available to OS.
Thanks both of you for the advise. It is nice to hear that it can see up to 4gig, and that having more will not cause Haiku to crash. I had never really heard of PAE util now, looked it up on Wiki, sounds interesting. Would be nice to have in 32bit Haiku, but there are more important things.
Both of the ones I am looking at have ATI Radeon™ HD3000, onboard chips. Not sure if Haiku works with those but at least VESA should.
VESA should work for you. No ATI HD graphics drivers right now.