Re: Video Question

[Sean /The RIMBoy/ <sean@rimboy.com>]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Steven Pritchard wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 09:59:21AM -0500, Tim McDonough wrote:
> > Recently there were a fair amount of postings about what's wrong with
> > nVidia based graphics cards. My question is what is a good graphics
> > card to buy that's well supported with open source drivers for Linux?
> 
> [ Steve puts on his Hardware HOWTO maintainer hat. ]
> 
> Your best bet right now is definitely one of the ATI cards.  Anything
> up to the 8500 should work just fine with any current Linux
> distribution.  The 8500 will work, although I'm not sure if any of the
> distributions support 3D on it out of the box.  (There is a free 3D
> driver, as well as a non-free driver.  The free driver is just fairly
> new.)

I concur.  My co-worker has an 8500.  It overall does fine with 2d, but
the opengl stuff (ie, Tux Racer) still has some issues.  He's running
RH7.3 on the box, which is not the end all be all of up to date distros,
but I'm not about to go in and reconfigure his workstation (as I don't
expect him to configure mine).

> For reference, it looks like a 8500LE with 64MB RAM is going to cost a
> bit less than $100.  One with 128MB is probably going to run another
> $20 higher.  They go up from there.  (The All-in-Wonder versions are
> particularly nice.)

Hrm... thanks for the info, as I'm about to purchase a new card.  I just
upgraded to flat panel, a Dell 1702FP.  I've got one at work using the
DVI, and the difference between the DVI and analog is depressing.  Seeing
as I've made this ATI Rage Pro work for the past 3 years it's time for an
upgrade. 

> BTW, my thinking is that if you might normally blow the money on a
> 9700, just get the 8500 now.  By the time it has working 3D and a game
> exists that actually needs that power, you should easily be able to
> get the card $100 cheaper (at least).

Agreed.  Unless you're heavily into (windows) gaming, you're better off
to go with a model that's seen some shelf life.  

I also concur with other peoples statements about the Matrox cards.  That
said, I had a lot of trouble trying to get my G450 to behave, and the
person that inherited the system after me indicated the same thing... he's
done dual heads before so I felt a little better.  That said, running it
like a G400 was overall fine.  If you're not going to do any 3d then
Matrox makes a good card.

Sean...

-- 
Believing I had supernatural powers, I slammed into a brick wall.
	--Paul Simon
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KG4NRC  http://www.rimboy.com  Your source for the crap you know you need.


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