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On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Jerry Feldman wrote: > Since I upgraded to SuSE 6.3, I have been having some troubles with my graphics card, and I think I finally tracked it down. I have a 4M ATI Mach64 AGP. The problem appears to be related to the Vesa frame buffer. I put in an 8M xpert98 PCI (which causes an IRQ conflict), and the problems I had been obsering went away. SuSE 6.3 uses XFree86 3.3.5. I don't generally play video games on my Linux system, but I want to upgrade to a good board, and I would like some recommendations. I may go to the KGP show tomorrow. > > Because of the lack of IRQs, I will need an AGP based board. > Chistoph recommended a VooDoo. I was just checking some prices for comparison (Linux.com): > 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 W/TV Out AGP $146. > Diamond Stealth S540 32MB 4x Savage 4 Pro $94 > Diamond Viper V770 AGP 4X 32MB NVIDIA TNT $124. > ATI All In Wonder 128 16MB AGP $178., 32MB $245. > > I have not checked other online resources, but I would like opinions pro/con. > FIrst, I don't think an AGP board improves the IRQ situation compared to a PCI board. Either one can grab an IRQ - and in both cases, it should be possible to share that IRQ with other PCI cards. I haven't personally used any of the boards you name with Linux. I will offer some general comments, though: If I were looking for an nVidia card, I think I'd buy it from someone other than Diamond. Diamond and S3 recently merged, so I have my doubts about long term support of any non-S3 cards from them. The ATI All-In-Wonder includes a TV tuner and video capture, and I don't think either of those things is supported by Linux. A more fair comparison would be with a Rage Fury Pro, which would be in the same price class as the 3dfx and Viper cards. If you actually have a motherboard with AGP 4X, you will probably want to go with a card that supports that. The Voodoo 3 and All-In-Wonder don't. ATI has announced an All-In-Wonder 128 Pro with AGP 4X, but it isn't shipping yet; the Rage Fury Pro does support it. 3dfx has announced Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 cards with AGP 4X, but they're also not shipping. The current hot chipset on the PC gaming scene is the nVidia GeForce 256. nVidia has Linux drivers for that (and their other chips as well), but they offer performance disclaimers about them. (They promise a better driver for XFree86 4.0.) -- Mark J. Dulcey mark at buttery.org Visit my house's home page: http://www.buttery.org/ Visit my home page: http://www.buttery.org/markpoly/ - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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