Re: Wanted: Advice on Video Cards
On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 02:17:15PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> I recently got myself a used Matrox Millenium (there are several---I got
> the one with the 220MHz RAMDAC and 4Megs WRAM), and am very happy with it.
> The online manual is available at
> http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/user_manuals/older/home.cfm if you want
> to check out the specs. It's an old card, but it seems able to handle
> plenty of bandwidth (e.g., I'm doing 1600x1200x16@75Hz without any
> trouble), and Xfree86 supports it well. (According to the 3.3.6
> documentation at http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.6/MGA.html, "This server is
> very well accelerated, and is one of the fastest XFree86 X servers.") I
> assume it'd be pretty lame for 3D graphics and games, not that I'd know,
> but for text editing and such it's great.
Actually, for 3D stuff using Utah-GLX, Matrox G200's and G400's cards
kick serious butt. ('sproingies' from xscreensaver needs to sleep() a
lot more to be visible... the sproingies bounce down the stairs so
quickly they're hard to -see-).
The only drawback is that Utah-GLX can be sorta flaky somedays, and when
glx dies, it can take everything with it. (But, then, that's what I get
for using the 'daily snapshots'.)
Matrox cards are nice midrange cards: not as fast as
the-latest-and-greatest-ultra-voodoo-7 at 3D, but very good 2D and still
good 3D ... and Matrox has been Linux friendly for some time.
Oh, yeah, John Carmack loves Matrox cards. :)
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