Muli Ben-Yehuda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > No, I'm afraid I haven't done any research into this problem yet and > thus cannot point you to such a card, although I should, soon. I > think Oleg did recently, though. Oleg?
Well, I tried to stay away from this discussion, but now I am drawn into it explicitly. I changed a couple of video cards recently. My Voodoo card that had served me for a few years went bust a few months ago. The ATI Radeon card I bought then lasted about 3 months or so (till the first power outage). I am using an nVidia card at the moment. It works for me, so I have not had a chance to peruse their support in any form. Basically, the "normal" (i.e. your friendly neighbourhood computer store) market is shared between ATI and nVidia. There is nothing else worth mentioning, at least if you are a layman retail purchaser. As we all know, ATI cards have free (as beer and speech) drivers, nVidia cards have proprietary drivers that happen to work. Linus (check his recent LKML postings on the subject) does not mind nVidia drivers all that much, though he says it is one of the few cases where binary modules are OK. It well may happen that your friendly neighbourhood computer store will not have ATI or nVidia in stock. That is, they may have nVidia but not ATI, or the other way around. Chances are that they can order, say, an ATI card for you if you insist on it for ideological reasons. The shop I bought my current card at did not carry ATI, and not being too ideological I bought nVidia knowing it would work. Now, to the question of specs. Short answer is, I don't know, and this has a bearing on everything else I will write below. A longer answer is, it is likely that even if there is a free (as in whatever) driver for your card it does not utilize the cards full capabilities in 3D acceleration etc, because the spec is not fully known. Now, you only need 3D acceleration (or AGP for that matter) if you do something really heavy, e.g. play advanced games on your computer. I don't play games, so I would be very happy if there were simple non-accelerated cheap (as in NIS 25 rather than NIS 250 a pop) cards on the market, I would be very happy because that's all I need. Now please write down your requirements for a spec (e.g. "full specification of every bell and whistle related to 3D acceleration", or "basic stuff that is enough for KDE"), google or otherwise ask around, and decide for yourself if that is available for the card of your choice. I would venture a wild guess that if games is your thing you will likely be better off with nVidia's proprietary driver than with a free one for ATI. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
