Re: PCI Video Card?
On Saturday 29 November 2003 03:32 pm, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to upgrade the video on my PC164LX system from
> its current Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro card to something better.
> I care nothing about 3D performace, but want something that is
> blazingly fast in 2D mode. My system has no AGP slots, so
> it's PCI only for me.
>
> Anybody have any suggestions?
Currently I'm using a Radeon 7500 on my LX164. It's a "mystery"
branding--maybe ATI, maybe PowerColor, maybe something else--but
it works.
With the Radeon 7500 on XFree86 4.3.0, you get:
2D acceleration - pretty good. it's a little slow compared to
the Geforce2Pro w/ nVidia driver in my x86 box, though,
especially at 1920x1440. there's also some horizontal
tearing tendencies (supposedly corrected in XFree86-CVS).
XVideo acceleration - very good. i can play back DivX at
1920x1440 with good visual quality and minimal frame
dropping.
3D acceleration - decent. hardware T&L is not yet implemented
in 4.3.0, though, so it's a bit slow when you have a lot of
polygons in play.
TV tuning: nope, not for Alpha. If I had a Radeon AIW, I might
take a crack at getting it working, but I'm rather short on
bling the moment.
Matrox is also pretty good with 2D accel, but DRI and XVideo
don't work for Matrox PCI cards (at least not last time I knew).
Matrox DRI support doesn't work on Alpha, period.
nVidia cards...hmmm. Not great. It's very difficult to find a
PCI nVidia card with any chipset faster than a TNT2. Even then,
it's a bit of a crap shoot as to whether it will work with SRM.
XVideo might work, you might get some 2D accel, but you
definitely won't get DRI support. I'd avoid nVidia for Alpha
systems.
I'm told 3Dfx PCI cards (Voodoo3 or later, mind you) work pretty
well. I haven't heard much about them though.
Stay FAR AWAY from S3 cards. A lot of Alpha systems ship with
these, but they're crap cards. A given S3 card might not even
work at all for XFree86.
--
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does
it still cost four figures to fix?"
Reply to: