[6236] in RedHat Linux List
Recommended video cards
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William T Wilson)
Tue Nov 26 13:25:03 1996
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 13:07:10 -0500 (EST)
From: William T Wilson <fluffy@benatar.res.cmu.edu>
To: redhat-list@redhat.com, heath@hml.com
In-Reply-To: <19961126161812.13111.qmail@mail2.redhat.com>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
To anyone considering purchasing a video card for linux, it pretty much
boils down to three choices: the Matrox Millenium, the Imagine 128, or
some sort of S3-968 card (#9 Motion 771 is probably the best- be sure to
get one with VRAM, not DRAM, even EDO DRAM is still much slower than
VRAM). Of the three, the Imagine 128 is the best card, but it also costs
the most (by a substantial margin) and has the worst Linux support- XFree
support is STILL completely unaccelerated, although AcceleratedX support
is pretty good. The other two are pretty even- the Matrox does have 3D
acceleration capabilities, and roughly the same 2D speed, at a higher
cost. However, support in XFree isn't that great yet. It IS accelerated
(rumors to the contrary notwithstanding), but it's not as accelerated as
it is in AcceleratedX or in Windows, and may have an occasional glitch,
and so under XFree it's not as good as an S3 card. Part of the reason for
this is that the XFree driver was in such high demand that it was sorta
rushed out the door before it was completely ready- it will get better in
the next few months. The S3-968 type of cards are the "Old Standby" of
XFree- the BEST kind of card to get for that X server. Because the XFree
developers have been writing S3 drivers for years, and one S3 card is more
or less like another, the S3-968 driver is well optimized and works
perfectly. However, this chipset is beginning to show its age- though
still quite good for 2D, it lacks accelerated 3D support.
The S3-ViRGe chipset and cards based on it (Diamond Stealth 3D, #9 Reality
33x, etc) is not really that great of a chip, IMO; while very fast for 3D
acceleration, under Linux there is no use for this acceleration. The only
programs I know of that might find a use for it are Quake and OpenGL, and
neither uses it (as of now). I don't know about AcceleratedX, but 3D
support is not built into XFree yet, so what you're ending up with is
basically an expensive Trio64 (equivalent to a #9 GXE64 or a Diamond
Stealth 64). If, on the other hand, you plan on playing lots of Direct3D
games under Win95, you might want to look at one of these because it will
really fly there.
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