[PLUG] Video card choices...

[Matt McKenzie]

Hello,

Matrox hasn't been around for a while, not in any significant way anyway.  I
still remember when 3DFX cards were the bees knees, now they are but a
distant memory.

These days, if you want 3D performance, you need to go either NVidia or
AMD/ATI.
If you want decent 2D and some 3D performance (but not great), there is
Intel.  Intel graphics work quite well with Linux, with open source drivers.

But you won't find a 4X AGP Intel card (well possibly, but ones that old
will not be very good, compared to their current stuff),
they are all integrated graphics chips on Intel motherboards.
You are talking about a tech that has been left in the dust, video chips
these days are either integrated in the motherboard or PCI-Express.

As for my own experience, I have used mostly Nvidia on the desktop, with
Linux.  Yes I use the proprietary blob driver.  No it isn't open source.
No I do not like that.  But, it works.  I can play high end 3D games and
such under Linux.  It works quite well.  I have used Nvidia for many years,
AGP and PCI-E.  I also have had some ATI stuff in laptops, which also works
well in Linux using the stock drivers, but I don't do high end 3D games on
the laptop, and thus have not used the proprietary driver.  I did try the
proprietary driver some time ago, and at least on my laptop it didn't work
right (ATI Radeon M9 I think it is).  ATI stuff does work with Linux, you
are basing your opinion on one single outdated card.

What it boils down to, is do you want to do any high end 3D stuff (games,
CAD, 3D modeling, etc), or do you  just want to have a nice video card to
keep an older system running.  If you want high end 3D, you should really
consider upgrading to a newer setup, with a dual core Intel or AMD CPU,
PCI-Express graphics, and DDR2 or DDR3 system RAM.  This means new
motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card, and most likely a new power supply.
If you want to go this route, we can help you find the right equipment, it
doesn't need to be all that expensive depending on what you choose.

As for keeping an older system going, I think when I was in the AGP stage, I
used an Nvidia 6600GT, it worked quite well in Linux (yes with proprietary
driver, but I wanted to do high end 3D stuff).  I have been using mostly
Fedora and WinXP dual boot on my machine, at that time it would have been
around Fedora 4,5,6 maybe.  Now I am running Fedora 12 and Win7, and my
setup is PCI-Express NVidia 8800GT.

HTH

----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight


On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Michael C. Robinson <
plug_1 at robinson-west.com> wrote:

> Are AMD and NVIDIA the only companies that produce high end video cards
> now?  What happened to Matrox?  I don't like NVIDIA because the company
> refuses to release the specs needed for open source drivers to be
> written.  I don't like AMD/ATI because my Radeon HD 3450 isn't stable
> under Linux and the video is slow.  There doesn't seem to be a good
> dual DVI card for dual heading that is an AGP 4x card from AMD.
>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>