Re: Best 3D card under (Gentoo) Linux?

[Tom Bruno <crweb@vwords.com>]

Honestly the best cards are Nvidia based cards.

  Ati drivers to put it mildly are horrible.  Open source yes, but ati
doesn't seem to give a crap about the drivers actually working.  After
many hours of headache, you'll end up buying a nvidia anyway, just so
you can have Gl support.

  Any nvidia based card works right after installing the drivers.  All
you do is change 1 item in a pre-existing x config  Driver=" "    to 
Driver="nvidia"   and bam, you are done, and on your way.  And they work
wonderfully.

   Another of the major complaints is,  the ATI drivers don't even
support a few of the major ATI proprietary GL functions that the card is
capable of.  This causes problems for games like Neverwinter Nights that
rely on the capabilities of the card to do things.

   Save yourself time and money.  nvidia is linux's best option.  Ati
benchmarks, and even the "better image quality" that so many claim ati
has,  just doesn't make up for the never ending headache you will have.

p.s.  Do NOT use any framebuffer built into the kernel, when you get a
GL based card with GL drivers.  They will conflict, and you will have
many lockups. (rivafb, or atifb modules).  You CAN include VGA VESA
support,  just not the actual FB driver modules.

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:58, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 08:14:05PM -0500, Kris Kerwin wrote:
> > Just that -- from your experience, what's the best game card under Linux?
> 
> ATI Radeon, somewhere between 8500 and 9200.
> 
> > Currently, I'm on an old Pentium III 500 Mhz with a Voodoo3 that I
> > can't get to work and 256M of RAM.
> 
> Anything more powerful than a Radeon 7500 is probably wasted on that
> system, unfortunately.  Even a Radeon 7000 is going to perform better
> than the Voodoo3.  (I know, I went from a Voodoo3 to a VE (7000).)
> 
> While the faster video cards off-load a lot of the work from the
> processor, you do still need some CPU to push these modern cards. 
> Also AGP 1.0 (all your board has most likely) will be a bottleneck.
> 
> Personally, I'd probably get this, but only because it is ridiculously
> cheap:
> 
>   http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-163-103&depa=0
> 
> Keep in mind that Radeon 9200 support was added fairly recently, so
> you'll need a very recent kernel/XFree86.  (I think it will work with
> Fedora Core 1 out of the box.)
> 
> Steve


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