Re: PCI Video Card?
On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 04:01:49PM -0600, Kelledin wrote:
>
> 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.
I've had good luck with:
1. ATI-branded 7500
2. VisionTek-branded XTACY 9100
Stay away from the 7000 (VE?), as it has caused oroblems with the
4.3.0 driver, and is somewhat slow, especially when compared to the
7500 and 9100.
> 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.
For 2D stuff, they work great, though not blazingly fast.
> 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.
My sentiments also; a great many problems the with SRM consoles of
older Alphas. On those that do work (LX/SX, Miata), the 2D speed is
pretty good with the normal XFree86 "nv" driver, but there's no hope
of 3D support.
> I'm told 3Dfx PCI cards (Voodoo3 or later, mind you) work pretty
> well. I haven't heard much about them though.
Yes, they do work quite well in 2D and 3D; even though they don't
do "real" DRM, the 3D support is FAST, at least comparable to the
newer Radeons when using a V3 3000. The older Banshee is also quite
usable, though slower than the V3 cards. Note that the latest 4.3.0
tdfx driver seems to demand more than 16MB of video RAM in order to
run at greater than 1024x768 resolution, a rather severe limitation,
IMHO, that the earlier 4.1.0 and 4.2.0 drivers don't share (IIRC).
> 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.
This is (unfortunately) very true of the Trio64-based cards that were
shipped in many Alphas. However, at least the Savage4-based boards
(Diamond Stealth III 540, IIRC) did have a decent (2D) driver under
4.1.0 and later, and could hold as much as 32MB of memory, but no 3D
support...
--Jay++
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Jay A Estabrook HPTC - LINUX support
Hewlett-Packard Company - MRO1-2/K15 (508) 467-2080
200 Forest Street, Marlboro MA 01752 Jay.Estabrook@hp.com
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