Re: best video cards (riva? or maybe matrox?)
iOn Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Samuel R. Scarano wrote:
> I'm going to be buying a new video card soon, so I wanted to see if
> anyone had any advice to give me.
> - Linux-friendliness of manufacturer (e.g., releasing specs on time,
> even helping develop drivers)
As mentioned below, nVidia released full GPL'd source code for Linux. You
don't get a lot friendlier than that. I guess they still don't reveal all
the specs of their hardware, but hey...
> - SVGAlib support (I'm willing to try the 4.0 prerelease)
I had to do some tweaking, but my TNT card seems to work fine with
SVGAlib. You have to edit the config files, and uncomment something like
"VesaText".
> - Mesa support (this I don't know much about, but I would like to try
> Quake with OpenGL, and if I could use OpenGL in X, that would be really
> neat!)
For this, there are three main contenders - Matrox G200 (G400 support is
promised), nVidia TNT(TNT2), or 3dfx Voodoo (2,3,?).
Matrox is *apparently* supporting their Gx00 cards with 3D acceleration
(i.e. Mesa). I *think* there have been some limitations on how open they
are, or something. I don't really know for sure.
nVidia has supported their cards with GPL'd source. It's not fully
developed yet, and doesn't support all the acceleration, but the Mesa
demos work very nicely on my TNT card (ASUS V3400TNT). I haven't been able
to get Quake to work. Quake II is supposed to be easy, though. And it's
capable of rendering to a window on your X desktop.
Voodoo card support is the most mature for Mesa... but it's binary-only,
no source, and so you have to run a program as root that you don't have
the source for. So, you can run Quake without any major problems, but from
what I've gathered 2D support is a little immature, and it's really hard
to render into a window.
> So far it looks like the Riva 128 and Riva TNT are the most promising
> chipsets. Is the 128 too old? Can anyone vouch for the Linux drivers at
> http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf/htmlmedia/software_drivers.html?
Nice, except for one little thing... emacs in X. The highlight and cursor
doesn't show up; makes it hard to work with. I don't use the X stuff much,
so there's a workaround, but it's slightly annoying. Otherwise, no
problems, worked the first time.
> I also have a general question: What kind of X acceleration will I
> notice other than region-copying?
I went from a Trio64 (S3) card w/2MB to a TNT card w/16MB. Window
dragging and such was noticeably faster. It feels speedier, though I
didn't really notice a *vast* improvement. Acceleration for 2D is a fairly
mature science.
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com
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