Guest NadBlaster Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 I have built many systems using various version of Mandrake, RedHat and Suse. The one thing I always seem to have problems with is the video card capabilities once I kick off X Windows and KDE. Out of all of the cards out there, which would you choose to meet the following spec: PCI Drivers already in most modern Linux packages Correctly recognized by Linux allows 1024x768 resolution in the higher colordepths Is commonly available (even if on ebay) Is among the cheaper priced of multiple possible choices Seems to manage to keep it's images within the video frame Doesn't have the menus or other objects screwy while other parts are ok. Not looking for the best, I'm looking for your opinion of the "always works" video card for the specs above. TIA Rudy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzylizard Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 I would have to say one of the cheaper, and older, NVidia MX cards -- Geforce 2 MX 400 (or something like that). Definitely on the cheaper side and most Linux distros should recognize it out of the box and set it up correctly. An argument against using any nvidia card is that Mandrake only has generic drivers for it. But as long as you are not doing any 3d stuff, the generic drivers will work fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted December 5, 2002 Report Share Posted December 5, 2002 The ATI rage128 chipset was the first to be 3D-accelerated in XFree4. It works with all modern Linux distributions because its driver for both 2D and 3D is included in XFree4. It works good and fast (IMHO). I have such a card, but it is AGP. I think that a PCI version exists, though. Note: There is only one problem: with Mandrake9.0, and only this version of this distribution, the rage128 chipset cannot be 3D accelerated because Mandrake9.0 has a DRI bug when used by this chipset. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 5, 2002 Report Share Posted December 5, 2002 NVIDIA tnt2. Cheap and stable with the nv driver. And it can be tweaked with the NVIDIA driver, if you want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
afrosheen Posted December 17, 2002 Report Share Posted December 17, 2002 I second that. Any old TNT2 or TNT2Ultra will get you up and running nicely. Plus everytime Nvidia releases a driver update your 3d will get faster. My brother STILL has my Ultra after all this time and still games with it. Hard to beat that :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted December 19, 2002 Report Share Posted December 19, 2002 I second that. Any old TNT2 or TNT2Ultra will get you up and running nicely. Plus everytime Nvidia releases a driver update your 3d will get faster. The picture is not as bright as u think. The XFree nv driver has no 2d or 3d support for my tnt2 ultra. So I use the 3123 nvidia drivers that work fine with it. However, when I upgraded to the 4191 drivers, I had consistent lockups just during webbrowsing !! I contacted nvidia and was told that it may be an issue with backward compatibility since the tnt2 series is quite old by now. So a driver upgrade may not always be an "upgrade" at all. Looking at threads like http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread...p?threadid=4997 its clear that many users have experienced 2d slowdown with the new drivers even though 3d frame rates have gone up. So there are absolutely no guarantees. The principle is stick with what works for u. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 That may be true, but this recent driver release has been a little more troublesome than previous releases. I have a GeForce2 GTS, and it is not doing as well with the 4191 drivers. I still think the TNT2 Ultra (right, afrosheen) is an excellent cheap vid card. I still have my old one on the bench computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 That may be true, but this recent driver release has been a little more troublesome than previous releases. I have a GeForce2 GTS, and it is not doing as well with the 4191 drivers.Similar experience here. I have reverted to the 3123 drivers. I still think the TNT2 Ultra (right, afrosheen) is an excellent cheap vid card. I still have my old one on the bench computer.I have a tnt2-ultra 32Mb AGP2x card. Since I only need 2d support (xvideo), its good enough for me. Unfortunately, it has no xvideo support in XFree86, due to nvidia's refusal to release specs of cards as old as these (4 generations behind the current geforce4 line). This means users like us are forced to use their binary-only unstable drivers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
afrosheen Posted December 21, 2002 Report Share Posted December 21, 2002 Unstable has more to do with hardware than Nvidia. Some motherboards and agp chipsets just don't play nice with those cards, even in Windows. At any rate, if you have or get an older card, the 3123's should be ok and give Xvid support. If you have a newer card, chances are the 4xxx drivers are decent. They work perfectly for me but aren't guaranteed for everyone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted December 21, 2002 Report Share Posted December 21, 2002 I have the TNT2 from Dec/99 and have not seen anything even on the Windows game side that would persuade me to go out and upgrade my card. What I would not do is buy anything but ATI or Nvidia. You could look on the newsgroups for each card as long as you can tolerate all the WIndows overclockers. alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia and alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JaseP Posted December 27, 2002 Report Share Posted December 27, 2002 Your choice of video card is more dictated by the motherboard chipset than by the choice of card, since any nVida card is a no brainer. The NV drivers will give you basic functionality, the proprietary drivers are freely available and regularly updated. That said, any PCI version of an nVida card should work. PCI limits the available choices. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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