Quoting Hetz Ben-Hamo, from the post of Thu, 14 Nov: > > in my machine I have an excellent MGA G400, it's great at text, > > seems like full-screen video at high resolutions under XF86 4.2 is a > > little choppy though, and lots of frames are dropped. possibilities > > are: > > Umm, with what player did you test it? mplayer plays it very nice > (even DVD's at the same machine) with 3% frame drops, if I remember > back from my old machine (I gave this card and bought NVidia). G400 ss > the most supported card in XFree with their open source drivers. > Matrox closed source drivers are also working pretty nice, specially > when it comes to TV out and Dual head.
using Xine(rama), I'll look at mplayer just in case. the limit is definitely NOT the player, more likely the display driver should be optimized to use the hardware acceleration of interpolating the image to full screen. > > 1. my CPUs are two slow (P2/350) (but non-fullscreen is fine), > > How much RAM? which Window Manager? 512 meg, Enlightenment, what has that got to do with anything? > > > 2. I'm not aware of some optimization options I could switch on. > > mtrr enabled? (/proc/mtrr) enabled in the kernel compile time. never looked up what it does. do I need to switch it on with sysctl or something? > dma? (hdparm) - you'll need both for good playback. just the defults, hdparm says it's already working optimally (if I'm doing the tests correctly). plus it does it from both old disks, new disks (with 8 meg cache) and CDroms... it's NOT a matter of reading fast and constant from the disk, there are NO frames dropped when I'm using the xine's initial window size, it ONLY happens when I set xine to fullscreen. I avoid it by leaving the window size and hitting ctrl-alt-+ a few times till it fits the screen, but it's a lame solution. > > 3. MGA just isn't good at this stuff, time to shell out $70 for a > > GeForce4 (I heard nVidia write the linux driver themselves), and > > gain a TV-out in the deal. > > Geforce 4 on Pentium 350?? yeah, a dual P2/350 with half a meg of L2 cache on each CPU and onboard ultraSCSI. > If I were you I would have buy those cheapo's Elite > Group board with Duron soldered in (it costs about 500NIS) foof, lucky for me you're not :) I might upgrade to an Athlon one day, but Celerons and Durons and their ilk are never going to see the inside of my boxes! I don't need a stronger machine, as far as I can tell, only better drivers or chipset for the video. > Add to that Geforce 3 (you really don't Geforce 4 - it costs too much now, > unless you need some hefty 3D) and it will be cheaper then Geforce 4. $70 for GF4 64meg with TV out is a lot? that's the most expensive GF4 I could find, there are even cheaper ones! > Regarding the driver - yes, they write it themselves (it's 95% same > driver as their Windows drivers), but if you're the type of only using > card with open source drivers, then thats something else... I'll go look. do I simply use 4.2 with their module as an add-on? that would be excellent. -- Closed captions provided by Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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