I am running xfree86 3.3.3, and have a STB Velocity 128. It seems that my videoI agree. Just after installing xfree86-3.3.3-3, I swapped out my ATI Xpert@play (mach64) AGP and put in my STB Velocity 128 AGP (Nvidia Riva). It's got rid of some horrible screensaver display glitches, but:
just sucks. It is just kinda slow: i.e., when running something simple like
xscreensaver, on the cool 3d hacks, it draws like 2 frames a second or something.
I am not expecting anything astounding as the card is not exceptional or
anything, but everything seemed to have much faster video when I ran windoze.
(last time I asked this someone told me to look at the xscreensaver site---no
help since the documentation does not address this problem, and more importantly,
I think this is not just a problem with xscreensaver but rather something with
the way X is using/not using my card.)Thanks much and Happy New Year 9almost),
Chris
(1) It does seem that the graphics are rather slower. I can get 1280x 1024 and 1600x1200 to work, as well as an apparently undocumented 1152x864 mode, but not 1024x768, at least not with this Belinea 19" monitor; the X server dies saying that it couldn't initialise the card.
(2) The card implements 32-bit colour depth but not 24-bit. So I can't get a True Colour mode at 1200x1024, I have to use a 16-bit mode! That is (according to the driver) a hardware limitation. Grrr!
(3) Gradient fills don't work properly. In KDE, both the two-colour destop background and the window title bar gradients are horribly banded even in 32-bit mode. I don't see how this could be the driver though - surely it used the card's graphics builtin graphics functions to do that.
(4) Although the card's 2D performance in Win95 is just fine apart from a few display glitches, under Linux it seems a whole lot slower than the ATI card. The XFree86/XSuSE drivers don't seem to make the most of the card's acceleration features. From what I read elsewhere, it seems the XFree86 people just aren't that interested in, or don't have the resources for, performance enhancements to drivers for cheap popular cards.
I'd guess that probably a 2nd-hand Matrox Millenium would give you what you want (in terms of price vs. 2D performance anyway) but I'm really just guessing based on circumstantial evidence and hearsay. I'll probably go looking for one myself soon. It's got to be better than this...
Ralph
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