Re: `where to get a usable video card' web page
On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 12:23:44PM -0400, jeramy b smith wrote:
> You can buy a Voodoo5 specifically for OF/Mac. Unfortunately, Linux support for this card lags.
>
> You can buy a Voodoo3 and flash it under MacOS with a utility that overwrites the PC Bios with OpenFirmware drivers. (PCI for sure, not sure about AGP)
>
> Besides that, ATI usually carries at least one card in their product line with OF compatibility.
Also you could onsider the 3dlabs glint R3 or permedia3 based boards, as the Formac Proformance 3 and the Appian Jeronimo 2000. These are a bit more expensive, being professional cards, and i don't know if Formac is still in the graphic card business or not.
The Appian Jeronimo 2000 is a board with 2 permedia3 rasterizers, able to drive 2 screens, and one
gamma transform & ligthning chip. Also this is a 'professional' 3D card, having better precision, and not those anoying holes as the cheaper card have.
Also the fact that 2 rasterizers are used is a no compormise option for dual screen, since solutions like the radeon dual head ones have to share the accel engine and memory between both heads. Also they come in both AGP versions (2x32MB and 2x 16MB) and PCI (with video in).
Now, on the linux side, there is both a fbdev driver (thanks to Romain Dolbeau) available as a
patch for both 2.2.x kernels and 2.4.x ones. It is not in the official kernels yet though. Romain i
s also playing with video overlay on the framebuffer, in order to get acceleration for for example
fbtv or vlc or other such, and also a nice video underlay under the fbdev console.
On the Xfree86 side, i wrote the driever, sponsored by Appian, and the current state is that 2D acc
el is working fine, there is still a little bug in the bios of some cards, but we are getting
behind it rsn. Xv is also supported, altough in the released version there is a little bug which is
already fixed in CVS. I will submit a patch to the debian package nextly, i think. Still Xv in Xinerama mode, with half the display on both heads work fine.
But still, the DRI/OpenGL support is not yet there, but i will be working on it nextly. Most of the stuff is already there, since DRI was first tested on the 3dlabs GMX2000 board, which has a gamma
and 2 MX rasterizers. only changing the stuff related to the rasterizers is needed, which is not as
big a work than writting DRI support from scratch. Also Alan Hourihane, from va resarch works on t
his.
The formac card has no gamma processor, and as thus DRI on it is not so interresting, nor near to b
e available.
Information on it can be had trough : http://www.appiangraphics.com/
There is a dealer list available from this site.
Note also, that there is another board, the appian AGX, for which i have not written support, but g
iven a tester with this board, i may be able to add support quickly as it is mostly the same chip.
Also appian makes some Radeon VE based boards.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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