[Gllug] Video card recommendation

[Rob Andrews]

[03-Sep-2001 14:07.45 (BST) / Richard Cohen]
 > Yeah, G550 is available in a few places now, but I don't know how good the
 > Linux support is.  I plan to buy one at some point, but not until I know I
 > can get DRI-accellerated OpenGL and (ideally) usable TV-out for DVDs (you
 > can do with with a G400, but it's messy, and I don't know about the G450).

I bought a G450 and was thoroughly suprised to find that it didn't work out
of the box. The G400 driver claimed support for it (as the G450 is a rev. 3
G400, from what I remember). It didn't work.

After fiddling a bit, I had it working with a part source, part binary
driver supplied by Matrox (ugh, I hate drivers with a huge chunk of
proprietary code in them). I hear XFree86 4.1.0 has native support for G450
now without using that driver though.

Xv support worked, but wasn't all that good quality. There was a noticeable
loss of quality in apps like xawtv (which uses Xv for hardware scaling), and
xine (which, for my DVD collection, is extremely necessary ;] ).

The DRI worked. Two things - in xinerama mode, you lose DRI. You also only
get Xv on the first monitor. But the biter about DRI was texture corruption.
If anyone is able to tell me if this is fixed, I'll be a happy man. My G450
is currently sitting somewhere in the lounge, I pulled it out of the machine
after a series of odd problems with it. Oh, and the opensource drivers don't
support DRI. I can live without DRI, really. All it ever gets used for is
funky screensavers, despite the fact that I plumped for Unreal Tournament
and Quake 3 (I can't say that I've played the latter for more than an hour,
after having it for over 2 months).

Anyhow. A relatively trouble-free card, with *mostly* opensource drivers.
My view of the current situation is that the drivers are 100% opensource.
But the obvious loss is DRI.

-- 
nine   <e> rob at impure.org.uk <t> +44-7773-324492 <w> http://impure.org.uk/
<pgp> 0x8bb5c71e  "This Basil. This Basil's hand. This smack on the head."

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug