Your analysis is spot-on... The MGA cards do suck major hosewater for games compared to ATi and nVidia's latest offerings, and nVidia's cards are only well-supported in Linux (not even BSD, though NV-GLX for FreeBSD is in the works). I'd recommend the Radeon 8500, though you will have to compile the CVS X tree until 4.2.0 is released (any revised timeline on this?).
You won't have 3D acceleration on Solaris (though it should be working under Linux Real Soon Now), but the 8500 is 2D/Xv/Render accelerated, and should be able to go as high as 1920x1440x32bpp with no major issues (dualhead should work too... the 64MB version should be able to do mega-high res on both heads). There might be a 128MB version, I'd recommend this if it's affordable (more pixmap cache == good thing) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nico" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 8:44 AM Subject: [Xpert]Best supported card today: Matrox, ATI, nVidia? > Hi all, > > I'm assembling a new high-end PC with all the newest components. I > will primarily be running Solaris 8 x86 on this machine, however, I > also like to play games and so I want to run Win2K for this reason. > > The video cards I am considering buying are: > - Matrox 550 or 450, or > - ATI Radeon 8500 or 7500, or > - nVidia chipset board GeForce3 Ti 500 or 200 > > I'd be very curious to hear any opinions (or statements!) from the > experts in this group on which board, on the whole, enjoys the best > support in the latest version of xfree86. By "best support" I think I > mean the best tradeoff between the stability and maturity of older > cards vs. the performance and features of the newer ones. > > While in Solaris land I expect to require nothing more than solid > accelerated 2D performance and support of high resolutions (QXGA) at > reasonable refresh rates. The reason for considering a high-end 3D > card is for running games under Windoze. > > Since drivers for all cards are well represented for windows, the only > issue is support under UNIX X servers. After reading this archive, I'm > gravitating towards one of the ATI cards, as it seems that nVidia > boards have many features that only their proprietary binary drivers > can utilize (not released for Solaris/x86?), and the Matrox boards, > while having great 2D, are not considered as good as nVidia and ATI > for 3D gaming. > > Anyone have opinions on this? > > TIA, > Nico > _______________________________________________ > Xpert mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
