Video Cards et. al.

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Since I upgraded to SuSE 6.3, I have been having some troubles with my
 graphics card, and I think I finally tracked it down. I have a 4M ATI
 Mach64 AGP. The problem appears to be related to the Vesa frame buffer. I
 put in an 8M xpert98 PCI (which causes an IRQ conflict), and the problems
 I had been obsering went away.  SuSE 6.3 uses XFree86 3.3.5. I don't
 generally play video games on my Linux system, but I want to upgrade to a
 good board, and I would like some recommendations. I may go to the KGP
 show tomorrow.
> 
> Because of the lack of IRQs, I will need an AGP based board. 
> Chistoph recommended a VooDoo.  I was just checking some prices for
 comparison (Linux.com):
> 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 W/TV Out AGP $146.
> Diamond Stealth  S540 32MB 4x Savage 4 Pro $94
> Diamond Viper V770 AGP 4X 32MB NVIDIA TNT $124.
> ATI All In Wonder 128 16MB AGP $178., 32MB $245.
> 
> I have not checked other online resources, but I would like opinions
pro/con. 
> 

FIrst, I don't think an AGP board improves the IRQ situation compared to a
PCI board. Either one can grab an IRQ - and in both cases, it should be
possible to share that IRQ with other PCI cards.

I haven't personally used any of the boards you name with Linux. I will
offer some general comments, though:

If I were looking for an nVidia card, I think I'd buy it from someone
other than Diamond. Diamond and S3 recently merged, so I have my doubts
about long term support of any non-S3 cards from them.

The ATI All-In-Wonder includes a TV tuner and video capture, and I don't
think either of those things is supported by Linux. A more fair comparison
would be with a Rage Fury Pro, which would be in the same price class as
the 3dfx and Viper cards.

If you actually have a motherboard with AGP 4X, you will probably want to
go with a card that supports that. The Voodoo 3 and All-In-Wonder don't.
ATI has announced an All-In-Wonder 128 Pro with AGP 4X, but it isn't
shipping yet; the Rage Fury Pro does support it. 3dfx has announced Voodoo
4 and Voodoo 5 cards with AGP 4X, but they're also not shipping.

The current hot chipset on the PC gaming scene is the nVidia GeForce 256.
nVidia has Linux drivers for that (and their other chips as well), but
they offer performance disclaimers about them. (They promise a better
driver for XFree86 4.0.)


-- 
Mark J. Dulcey               mark at buttery.org
Visit my house's home page:  http://www.buttery.org/
Visit my home page:          http://www.buttery.org/markpoly/

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