"Moore, Paul" wrote: > > Hi, > I'm looking at buying a new PC sometime soon - I've just seen a *very* > good looking deal for a 350MHz Pentium II system. As usual, my main > compatibility worries are with video and sound cards. > > The video card is described by the supplier as an AGP S3 3D card, with a > 365 chipset. I've looked through the hardware compatibility HOWTO and > the XFree86 website, and I can't see mention of this card or chipset > specifically. Can anybody confirm that this card will work OK on Debian > (basically Hamm at the moment...) I'll want to use X, and possibly > OpenGL (Mesa). Probably not graphics intensive stuff generally, but I'd > like to look at getting Quake and some other games running (it's not the > end of the world if I fail, but I'd have to run them in DOS/Win95, so > maybe it's bad enough... :-) > The card is suppported in both XFree86 and svgalib. The S3 cards are probably the best-supported video cards in Linux. FWIW, I have a Diamond Stealth 3D AGP, which is a S3 ViRGE/GX2 card. I don't know what the chip number is, but the 3xx series is the ViRGE chip.
> Actually, does anybody know what this card is like, in general - is it > 3D accelerated or not, do I need to check things like how much memory it > has, will it run Quake II at mega-accelerated speeds, etc etc? If it's > not up to much, does anybody have any suggestions as to a good card to > get? I've been thinking of one of the ATI [EMAIL PROTECTED] cards - are they > a good bet? > The S3 is nice. It's quite fast, but I've had some problems with mine; XFree used to crash pretty often. A quick mail to them revealed that there are bugs with version 3.3.2.3, which are fixed in 3.3.3. To work around them, you must put the line ``chipset s3_virge'' in the Device section of /etc/X11/XF86Config. This stopped _most_ of the problems, but I still get some video lockups when running The GIMP 1.0.2. I don't know why, as it should not be crashing my X server, but it certainly seems to. Some of the more math-intensive xlock screensavers (eg some of the fractals) also cause me problems. The system does not lock up hard, but the video display changes to show vertical bars of dark grey. I have to log into the system from a serial terminal or over the network and reboot it, or it can lock hard. I don't know if all these problems are fixed in the 3.3.3 release of XF86, but I'm hoping so. The S3 is not a supported 3D accelerator. AFAIK, the only hardare-accelerated board supported under Linux is a 3Dfx voodoo/voodoo2 based card like the Diamond Monster 3D. But this is a 3D-only card, and you have to patch your 2D cards video output into the 3D cards input. This can degrade video quality. So far, I have not seen a decent 2D/3D combo card for Linux. The killer card to watch out for would have a S3 for the 2D and a Voodoo2 (or 3?) for the 3D, on one AGP card. > The sound card is described as a SoundBlaster 16 Compatible, made by > SoundPro. Again, will this be supported, and/or is it a good card? The > only real use I have for sound is likely to be for games (both under > Linux and Windows), so it's not a disaster if it's low spec, but I'd > like something reasonable... > To the best of my knowledge, there are _no_ soundblaster 16 compatible cards, other than the ones made by Creative, eg the SB32/AWE64 etc. Probably going to have problems here. > I'm sure that there are some compromises being made in this system, but > frankly, I'm not sure where they are. The deal is too good to just > ignore, though... Any help (or pointers to useful sources of > information) would be much appreciated. > http://www.xfree86.org - XF86 home page, info about supported cards http://www.4front-tech.com - OSS/Linux commercial sound drivers (you can download a demo version) uhm... check the 3dfx-howto, it has good info about 3D cards... -- ______________________________________________________________ | ian eure, network admin, freelance security consultant, and | | manically depressed paranoid schizophrenic, at your service. | ; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://minion.org ; : raw speed = 105.6 wpm with 4.5% errors : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
