>
> On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 09:26:27AM +0100, Erik Thiele wrote:
> > which 3D card should i buy
> [.. everything boils down to GL or rather mesa ..]
>
> Well, you can't go wrong with 3dfx. It's got the most stable highest
> performance drivers out there.
True if you want to run fullscreen, and you can live with the other
limitations ie 16 bit colour and Z buffer, and 256x256 textures maximum.
The Voodoo 4 and 5 overcome these limitations however, and I am just waiting
for them to come out...
Also there is no actual AGP support per se. They are however the only cards
you can get full acceleration without running as root.
> The g400 is just not that fast yet if you
> want a stable driver (pre-warp GLX)..
The current warp drivers are stable in my experience. There seem to be some
severe fill rate limitations (at least on the non Max versions of these
cards) which make them unusuable at high resolutions. AGP support works
on some chipsets (BX, not Athlons).
> The g400 has an advantage however in that I have yet to convinced this
> thing (Voodoo3) to run in a window. When I tell it to run in a window it
> ends up full-screen anyway and it tries to use this LAME framebuffer copy
> hack which makes it not even worth it. I just haven't managed to get good
> 3D in a window with the voodoo3 with Mesa, at least not with X 3.3.6 and
> Mesa 3.1. If someone can tell me how PLEASE DO! => Why would you want
> it? Just wait till something crashes. gdb and full-screen voodoo3 don't
> mix. Trust me. =>
I think the framebuffer copy is all the hardware supports. Try adding
another graphics card or debugging remotely. Mind you it often locks the
machine totally when it does crash...
> nVidia is supposed to have kickass drivers. Eventually. The only stable
> drivers you can get now are for 3.3.5 and older X servers and they're so
> slow you'll wonder if you're actually getting accelleration at all.
> nVidia has not earned a reputation for cooperation with the community
> either.
The new NVidia drivers are complete crap and lock within seconds. The old
ones were usuable, I dodnt find them that slow on TNT 2 Ultras. Nvidia
are paying for closed source drivers which are apparently very good; they
will be out with XFree86 4. The closed source nature causes problems for
some of us who need to change the code.
In summary the situation is a mess now. What we want is GGI3D support, and
Voodoo is likely to be the first target...
Justin
