[sclug] Re: Video driver

[Alex Butcher lug]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Tony Sumner wrote:

> > 2.5. port the 3.3.6 driver to 4.x ;-)
> 
> Mm. Thing is, if it were that easy wouldn't XFree86 have done it?

It depends. ;-)

And of course, just because it's hard for them, it doesn't necessarily mean
that it would be hard for you or I. Of course, it probably is, hence the
smiley.

> > I've recently bought a Gigabyte AR64S-H Radeon 7500-based card and
> > an Innovision Inno3D Tornado using the nVidia GeForce 440MX.
> 
> Thanks, Alex. These sound good. There is a page
> http://the.earth.li/XFree86/current/Status.html that lists supported
> video cards and neither Radeon nor Gigabyte is listed.

I wouldn't expect to see Gigabyte listed - they merely put ATI chips on
their own boards. But the ATI Radeon 7500 should be listed somewhere. It's
certainly included in the 4.2.0 changelog. Incidentally, the Radeon 7500 is
currently the fastest VGA card whose 3D features are supported by open
source drivers. As I mentioned though, said drivers are still somewhat
unstable.

> Odd, but I suppose
> if you are running it under XFree86 v.4 then it must be ok. It has this
> to say about nVidia:
> 
>    4.2.1:
> 
>        Support (accelerated) for the Riva 128, 128ZX, TNT, TNT2 (Ultra,
>    Vanta, M64), GeForce (DDR, 256), Quadro, GeForce2 (GTS, Ultra, MX),
>    GeForce3, and Quadro2 is provided by the "nv" driver.

You won't get any 3D acceleration with XFree's "nv" driver - for that, you
need to use nVidia's closed driver instead. Come to think of it, I'm not
even sure how much *2D* accleration you get with the "nv" driver...

> Savage4 is supported but is there any disadvantage in AGP? I hope to get
> to the meeting on Wednesday and I can talk about it then.

AGP is (arguably) faster than PCI. It's probably fair to say you'll only
notice the difference if you're using the 3D facilities fairly intensively
though.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher        Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                        Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                           <http://www.assursys.com/>