Re: video card ?
On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 01:31:12PM +0200, Kaare Hviid wrote:
> today even the lowly Matrox G550 requires a binary
> IA32 HAL driver - and that at the price that DGA won't work.
My G450 does 2D and 3D with Free software only. It's not fast 3D, but it's
enough to play Armagettron on a PIII 500MHz :)
A colleague at work has a workstation with a Tyan-S2882, and he's using
just the on-board 8MB ATI Rage XL. It's pretty slow even on 2D, though.
gnome-terminal scrolls noticeable slowly (especially scrolling backwards,
like going back one line in less). xterm is super-fast, though. I don't
know why, so I just un-installed gnome-terminal to make sure he wouldn't end
up with a slow terminal.
> Today, I'm using the Radeon 9800 that came with my Athlon 64 box.
> No 3D, no TV-out, no TV-tuner support - but with one of those jet
> engines. So, is there anything out there running smoothly on AMD64
> without power drain and without noise pollution?
I would be surprised if an old Matrox or ATI AGP (or even PCI) card was not
good enough. My Matrox G450 can keep up with gnome-terminal just fine on a
PIII 500MHz :) Of course, you'll only get VGA, not DVI, outputs. The
Matrox drivers won't do DRI 3D if there's not enough RAM left over after the
framebuffer, though. An 8MB G200 can do 3D in 800x600x24, but not
1024x768x24. (My 16MB G450 can).
The drivers for all these old cards are 100% Free, so even though I haven't
used them in an AMD64, I wouldn't expect problems. I've never even tried to
use the mga_hal proprietary stuff. Even without it, video colorspace
conversion and scaling is accelerated enough watching movies on a PIII
500MHz.
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cor , des.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC
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