On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Paul Richards (Pauldoo) wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm thinking about buying a new PC and getting a really good GFX card.
> I was looking at first the GeForce2
Get it if you want the best consumer-level chipset and it doesn't
bother you that nVidia won't release driver sources. Otherwise get a
Matrox G450. The new ATI chipset looks like giving nVidia a run for its
money, but last I saw the GLX driver support wasn't quite there yet. You
should probably stay away from 3Dfx, their hardware featureset is falling
further and further behind and for the first time recently their Linux
driver support is starting to flag as well.
> but then I kinda wandered about a
> bit and found the 3D Labs cards. In particular the Oxygen GVX210.
Don't waste your money on a card which will give you much slower
and uglier gaming performance than a GeForce 2 at three times the price.
These card are for CAD and scientific modeling. They have lots of fast
SGRAM (too expensive for a consumer card), virtual texture memory
management in hardware (cool but since no one else does it yet...), and
IIRC they still have a comfortable lead over even nVidia in the geometry
acceleration department (wasted on today's low-detail game worlds).
The R3 chipsets just got single pass multitexturing, while all the
gaming cards have been doing that for years and are now moving to more
advanced types of texture blending such as three-texture blends (ATI) and
microcode-based texture composition engines (Matrox). You'll probably
never see a 3Dlabs chipset with cool features like environment mapped
reflections (nVidia), accumulation buffers (3Dfx's T-buffer), skeletal
animation (ATI's newest chipset), per-pixel geometry-interpolated lighting
and shading (nVidia's GeForce 2), a microcode engine for texture
composition (Matrox's G400/G450), lossy texture compression (all of them
now, I think), etc etc etc.
> Is OpenGL for this card supported by XF4.0 or Utah-GLX in any way?
I don't belive so. They also have not released GLINT specs and
have shown no signs that they intend to do so in the near future.
> I can see that XF86 seems to have full 2D accel
3Dlabs' hardware is so well designed that the original Permedia2
2D accel code (which IIRC is the last 3Dlabs chipset there's public docs
for) still works perfectly on their latest generation hardware.
> but I think I need a bit
> more than that for my $999.
I'd say so. I got my Oxygen for free as a loaner from a
well-connected friend, or I wouldn't even have considered buying one.
Jon
---
'Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in
becoming one with God.'
- Scientist G. Richard Seed
