video cards

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Oct 20, 2009, at 1:51 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

> My nvidia card from 2 years ago is flaking out on me (flickering the  
> display
> for a while, then locking up my computer).  Once I removed the  
> nvidia card
> and relied on the onboard video, everything was stable, so it must  
> be the
> video card going bad.
>
> So I'm wondering what the current state of video cards are for  
> linux.  Is
> ATI finally back in the game or not?

Depends on which game you're talking about. The open-source drivers  
are getting pretty decent even for recent hardware. Not sure about the  
closed driver's performance or stability or compatibility with the  
latest xorg. I do know they're still way behind nVidia on GPU-based  
video decoding (hell, they're even behind Intel).

> I'm looking for something that is
> mid-range (it's replacing a Geforce 8600) to play games in windows  
> (nwn2),
> and also be a mythtv frontend (in linux, with full HD playback).

If mythtv is one of the games, stay away from ATI, get an nVidia card,  
no question.

> And, since I've already been burned by this when they did their last
> naming-scheme change, what do the various numbers/card-names mean  
> for ATI
> and Nvidia?  Nvidia seems to be going back to 3-digit numbers, which  
> bugs
> me.  I figured out their 4-digit system the hard way: the most  
> significant
> digit was the generation marker, and the *third* digit indicated how
> high-end the card was (an 6800 was higher performance than a 7300).   
> So how
> do the 3-digit ones compare to, say, a 9800GT?

No clue. The most recent nvidia cards I've acquired were a 9400M  
(onboard an ion motherboard) and a 9600GT, both of which are more than  
enough for my needs. I'm sure wikipedia has some answers on that. ;)

The main things to know for mythtv use:

-Most 8000 series and all 9000 series and up are supported by VDPAU  
(Video Decode and Presentation Acceleration for UNIX, or something  
like that -- GPU-based video decoding).

-The 8600 and up in the 8 series, then 9500 and up are necessary to  
support the VDPAU Advanced 2x hardware deinterlacer, which is widely  
regarded as the best deinterlacer available under Linux, when viewing  
HDTV content (i.e., 1080i mpeg2).

-The 100 series and up support a wider range of codecs (adds xvid and  
divx, I think) than the earlier cards (which support mpeg2, h.264 and  
assorted other mpeg4 variant).

-You probably don't really *need* VDPAU until you start talking about  
blu-ray and other high definition h.264 material, but its nice to have.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org