I'm going to be buying a new video card soon, so I wanted to see if anyone had any advice to give me. (This isn't really Debian-specific, but I think it's something most of us Debian users care about, so I figured it would be worth a discussion on debian-user.) I think I'm in about the same position as a lot of people; these are my priorities (in descending order of importance):
- Xfree86 support - price (preferably < $80, which doesn't seem to be a problem according to pricewatch.com) - Linux-friendliness of manufacturer (e.g., releasing specs on time, even helping develop drivers) - speed - SVGAlib support (I'm willing to try the 4.0 prerelease) - Mesa support (this I don't know much about, but I would like to try Quake with OpenGL, and if I could use OpenGL in X, that would be really neat!) So far it looks like the Riva 128 and Riva TNT are the most promising chipsets. Is the 128 too old? Can anyone vouch for the Linux drivers at http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf/htmlmedia/software_drivers.html? I'm also looking at the Millenium G200, but it looks like SVGAlib support is still lacking. Are there other cards that I should look at? Are there better sources of information than the XFree READMEs and the Linux Hardware Database (lhd.datapower.com)? I also have a general question: What kind of X acceleration will I notice other than region-copying? How much of a difference does it really make? I have a PCI ET6000 now (with XF86_SVGA, accelerated), and moving windows around (opaque) is a little choppy sometimes, especially when moving vertically, even though the CPU seems to stay idle; is that something that will go away with a nicer card? I would really appreciate answers to any of these questions -- thanks! -- Samuel Scarano
