Re: amd64 and video card experiences?
On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 06:59:29PM -0400, Tom Vier wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2004 at 08:28:50PM -0600, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> > So, either cough up US$50 for a current-but-not-so-hot ATI card, which
> > is supported for the most basic stuff by a free driver, or spend US$100
>
> 3d works fine on my radeon 9200. i play quake2 on it and it's fast.
> what features are missing?
IIRC that card has a R250 or R280 chip, which still manages to slip
into de "current-but-no-so-hot" category. What's not supported by the
free drivers? Last time I looked, TNL was still not quite there.
Shaders are not supported (what ATI calls shaders for that chip).
Things like 3D textures, which that chip does support, isn't supported
by the driver (at least not with hardware acceleration). The z-buffer
acceleration that's supported by that chip isn't supported by the
driver either. I'm not sure about antialiasing. And that's pretty
much it, because that chip doesn't have many more features beyond the
standard OpenGL pipeline.
And the quake2 engine is about 8 years old (IIRC, but 1996 sounds like
it). It was programmed with quite different hardware in mind (back
then a Pentium II was a fast machine and 64 MB of RAM a lot), so it's
to be expected, that it performs well with modern hardware. Even the
Quake3 engine is old now (even if an large number of games out there
are using it). But the game is still as much fun as it was back then,
that's right :-)
Marcelo
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