On Sunday 28 July 2002 6:13 pm, Andy Sy wrote: > What have been your experiences with different > vidcard chipsets under XFree86? I'm thinking of > using a cheapo Sis6326 or Savage4 card, any > particular warnings or horror stories to tell?
I am using an onboard SIS 630 32MB video RAM in XFree86 4.2. It has really bad video acceleration support (in Linux only), particularly when using Mesa's GL implementation. How bad? Really bad, 1 frame per second (fps) playing Unreal Tournament on a 640 x 480 full-screen resolution. 1 frame per second also when playing Tuxracer, either windowed or full-screen. Yuck! The only "decent" performance I can get with my SIS 630 and Mesa combination is when I play Armagetron. I say "decent" because I turned off the fancy settings that choke my card, like anti-aliasing, bilinear instead of trilinear buffering, no sky display, no line and font smoothing. The resolution gets worse when you add more opponents, getting down from 26 fps to about 15 fps with 10 or more lightcycles added. SIS 630 DirectX acceleration in Windows is great though. I don't know why OpenGL support is bad. Maybe it's because Nvidia cards have their own proprietary OpenGL extensions. On the bright side, movie-playback with mpeg, avi, VCD or DVD (with the infamous d4d plugin CSS support enabled in xine) file-formats is nice and perfect on XFree 4.2. No ugly screen-resizing unlike in 3.3 or 4.1. Xine's slow-motion and fast-forward playback is now perfect with SIS 630 on XFree 4.2. Catherine Zeta-Jones' smooth, ballet-like moves in Entrapment is a joy to watch in slow-mo (Do I really watch the ballet moves, or the lithe body with tight abs and shapely thighs? :-) ) I'd say forget the SIS 6326 or Savage4. A TNT-class Nvidia chipset will do fine, and reasonably cost less. TNT runs fast enough to hurdle the magic 60 fps in Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena. The more beefy GeForce-type cards will get you past 100 fps, but penny-pinchers like us will be happy with a TNT. However, you can get a "budget" Geforce-based card with a GTS core for less than P 2,500 (e.g. Visiontek Xtacy series, now available in Metro Manila). It is a well-known fact that Nvidia has the fastest drivers and video cards for Linux. Since Nvidia's OpenGL base drivers are the same in Windows or in Linux, you get the same framerate on either OS platform. ATI's Linux drivers are broken and unoptimized. A friend of mine tried it on his machine, but performance was subpar. My friend now has an Nvidia TNT running flawlessly in Linux, but it wasn't easy getting it to work in the first-place. If you're going for the Nvidia-class hardware, here are a few caveats. Get rid of Mesa GL and the corresponding libraries in your installation. Mesa GL conflicts with Nvidia's OpenGL implementation. After doing that, you'll need to download and install Nvidia's kernel Architecture support and GLX (server modules and OpenGL libraries). Well, forget all of the above except the first four paragraphs if you don't plan to frag, hack, and slash digital cretins, or if you get dizzy with Quake's false vanishing-point horizon movements. mikol _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
