[sclug] Video driver problem

[Alex Butcher lug]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Tony Sumner wrote:

> I have been corresponding with RedHat support about the problem I had
> (CTRL-ALT-Fn works but ALT-F7 doesn't) and it turns out that there is
> not yet a supported driver for the S3 chipset with Trio64V+ in version
> 4 of XFree86. Strange; the s3 driver works ok in every way except that
> one. So what do I do now:
> 
>   1. re-install RedHat 7.1 (and lose OpenOffice);
>   2. wait for XFree86 to come up with a driver;

2.5. port the 3.3.6 driver to 4.x ;-)

>   3. Install Debian instead :-)
>   4. buy another card (and enjoy more than 1MB of RAM)
> 
> What do you recommend? If 4, what is your favourite card?

There's very little choice at the moment, particularly if you have a
motherboard that only takes 1.5 volt AGP cards. I've recently bought a a
Gigabyte AR64S-H Radeon 7500-based card and an Innovision Inno3D Tornado
using the nVidia GeForce 440MX. Both are 64M cards with TV output, and cost
about 40+VAT, though the Gigabyte uses SDRAM instead of faster DDR, has DVI
output and comes with a small pile of Windows games (most of which have
Linux ports, I think, so they may not be completely useless!).

The Gigabyte also has *much* better video quality than the Inno3D card.

The Gigabyte card is about 10% slower than the GF440MX under Windows, but
only about 30% of the speed of the GF440mx under XFree with nVidia's
proprietary drivers. The Radeon driver doesn't seem terribly stable until
you get to the current-ish CVS versions of XFree and DRI, which have a
tendency to lock the machine hard when X is quit and restarted. nVidia's
drivers seem somewhat stable (suprising, given that they're closed...)

There are also Radeon 8500 cards out there which have basic 2D support in
XFree 4.2, but currently need ATI's closed drivers for any 3D support.

I think for stability and performance, I'd have to recommend using a good
quality nVidia-based card (Leadtek, Gainward...) unless you're violently
opposed to using nVidia's driver.

> Tony Sumner

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher        Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                        Need reliable and secure network systems?
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