(As an aside, is *anyone* affiliated with the alphalinux.org site going
to update 6+ year old FAQs? It's true that many things have not changed,
but the sections on recommended and/or supported video hardware
definitely could stand some updating.)
The subject hasn't come up in many moons, so I figure it's worth asking
about current recommendations as far as PCI video cards for Alpha
systems in general, and the PWS 433au (Miata) in particular. Mine has
the 8-bit TGA2 card (2 MB). At 1024x768 resolution, GNOME works well
enough as far as color selection, but KDE is a disaster. Beyond the
obvious problem of a limited color palette, minor display updates
(output in a terminal window) get enough of the CPU's attention that
audio playback sputters and stalls until the screen updates stop.
Searching back through approx. three years' worth of list archives
suggests the following:
ATI 7000, 7500, 9100: good choices, but the 7000 is slow compared to
the other two, and non-ATI-branded cards may have BIOS issues when
interacting with SRM at boot time.
3dfx Voodoo3 and later: likewise good choices. No "true" DRI, but
the cards compare favorably speed-wise with cards that have DRI.
Any recommendations as far as cards with 32-bit vs. 64-bit interfaces?
Assuming TGA (not TGA2) hardware can be found at a reasonable price
(probably not a good assumption), how does it compare to the above?
Is there such a thing as VESA fb support on Alphas, or is that strictly
an x86 kind of thing?