Re: Video Card

[" Raymond A. Ingles" <inglesra@frc.com>]

On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Tim (Pass the Prozac) Sailer wrote:

> Can anyone make a recommendation for a high-end video card (3d type) that
> is supported by the current X?

 For this, there are three main contenders - Matrox G200 (G400 support is
promised), nVidia TNT(TNT2), or 3dfx Voodoo (2,3,?). If you really want to
do 3D, though, you need to look at Mesa (the de-facto Linux OpenGL
software).

 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. From the hardware reviews
I've seen (e.g. www.tomshardware.com or www.aceshardware.com) it's not the
fastest video card out there, but it's also not the priciest.

 nVidia has supported their cards with GPL'd source. It's not fully
developed yet (full speed ETA: September), 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, though, is
quite enjoyable at 800x600. Someday I'll try Quake III.

 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. The Voodoo chips really only work well rendering
3D to a full screen.

 The hardware reviews seem to like either the TNT or Voodoo chipsets,
which are apparently about equal in quality. (A few percent either way
doesn't really impress me that much.) I went with TNT, because they
actually wrote Linux drivers and gave away the source. I like to vote with
my dollars when I can.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles         (248) 377-7735           ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com

           Microsoft Windows - The problem for your problem.