best video cards (riva? or maybe matrox?)
I'm going to be buying a new video card soon, so I wanted to see if
anyone had any advice to give me. (This isn't really Debian-specific,
but I think it's something most of us Debian users care about, so I
figured it would be worth a discussion on debian-user.) I think I'm in
about the same position as a lot of people; these are my priorities (in
descending order of importance):
- Xfree86 support
- price (preferably < $80, which doesn't seem to be a problem according
to pricewatch.com)
- Linux-friendliness of manufacturer (e.g., releasing specs on time,
even helping develop drivers)
- speed
- SVGAlib support (I'm willing to try the 4.0 prerelease)
- Mesa support (this I don't know much about, but I would like to try
Quake with OpenGL, and if I could use OpenGL in X, that would be really
neat!)
So far it looks like the Riva 128 and Riva TNT are the most promising
chipsets. Is the 128 too old? Can anyone vouch for the Linux drivers at
http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf/htmlmedia/software_drivers.html?
I'm also looking at the Millenium G200, but it looks like SVGAlib
support is still lacking. Are there other cards that I should look at?
Are there better sources of information than the XFree READMEs and the
Linux Hardware Database (lhd.datapower.com)?
I also have a general question: What kind of X acceleration will I
notice other than region-copying? How much of a difference does it
really make? I have a PCI ET6000 now (with XF86_SVGA, accelerated), and
moving windows around (opaque) is a little choppy sometimes, especially
when moving vertically, even though the CPU seems to stay idle; is that
something that will go away with a nicer card?
I would really appreciate answers to any of these questions -- thanks!
--
Samuel Scarano
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