"Jon M. Taylor" wrote:
> 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.
Just to add to the above: The 3Dlabs cards are designed for OpenGL support
first, not gaming. Thus gaming performance may lag behind current consumer
level cards, butin terms of performance in the professional CAD/modelling
area, these cards are in the top league. Sepecially considering correctness
of the implementation and performance.
So, if you want to use this card only under Linux, you may need to invest in
getting a 'commercial' X server to have this card supported.
Greetings,
Steffen
_______________________________________________________________________________
Steffen Seeger mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
TU-Chemnitz http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~sse
