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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:09 UTC (Thu) by odie (guest, #738)In reply to: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) by dark Parent article: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)
The 9000 Pro is more expensive, and I couldn't justify spending extra money on faster OpenGL for these machines, when the cheaper cards already exceed the requirements.
The R300 project is of course a nice initiative, but without specifications from Ati, the developers will have a hard time making a quality driver. As the chip manufacturers make their own drivers instead of releasing specs, the free drivers suffer.
Matrox also used to provide specs, and the free Millenium II drivers are some of the best drivers out there. Now that Matrox develop their own drivers instead, they have still to produce a card that can beat the Millenium II at 2D speed in X.
The manufacturers are probably not lying when they say they can't release the specs due to NDA's with subcontractors. One has to wonder, though, how wise it is to base your entire business on technology you do not have the full rights to.
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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:16 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I always wondered if this is an illusion. I have one machine with a Millenium II and it absolutely hauls ass. I have never done any x11 benchmarks, but that card just flies. Even painful operations like Mozilla's smooth scrolling are perfectly fast.
How come nobody else can touch this ancient card in 2D performance?
Speculation Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:16 UTC (Thu) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] I think the focus has shifted so much to 3D performance that 2D performance has been sacrificed, and these days it's just an emulation layer on top of the 3D logic.
Incompatibility List Posted Aug 19, 2005 6:23 UTC (Fri) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link] Remember, folks, we have a community effort to keep track of stuff to avoid, located here:
'Stuff to avoid' also means stuff that doesn't work with free drivers, although it's also fair to mention that, yeah, if you're desperate, there is a way to use it.
Incompatibility List Posted Aug 19, 2005 15:37 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Very cool! I knew of linuxcompatible.org, and various other compatibilitylists, but not of an /in/compatibility list. Now bookmarked! Duncan
Incompatibility List Posted Sep 4, 2005 16:34 UTC (Sun) by daenzer (✭ supporter ✭, #7050) [Link] The video page seems a little skewed, but I may be biased. But please at least remove verifiably incorrect statements like "ATI's Radeon driver doesn't work at all with 64 bit Linux Kernels". That hasn't been true since the beginning of this year.
A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 19, 2005 10:07 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] In some ways we're actually catching up. This isn't through any particular technical wizardry, it's just that a few years ago each new year's cards meant a new feature set with huge changes (improvements) across the board, and now it means incremental upgrades...
ATI had big architectural changes in 2000 (R100, Radeon) in 2001 (R200 aka Radeon 8500) and 2002 (R300 aka Radeon 9700), then nothing but more pipelines, smaller die sizes and faster clock speeds until now in 2005. The R400 codename is essentially meaningless, at least as far as drivers go. We don't know for sure whether the new cards released this year are/ will be architecturally different, but even if they are it's the first change in almost 4 years.
My guess is that in five years time 3D cards will be worth no more fuss than soundcards. You'll probably be able to buy one that doesn't work with Linux, or provides binary only x86-64 drivers for kernel 2.6.25 only, but why would you? The cheap on-board 3D will be good enough for most people (and of course it will easily run the GPL'd Doom 3 engine that might be available by then) and the rest will buy from a reputable vendor with solid Free software drivers.
Meanwhile please support the R300 project if you have any chance to do so.
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