Recommended Video Card with OpenGL Acceleration?

[Miguel Mendez]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 17:49:28 -0700
Chris Kuethe <chris.kuethe at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

> I've started down the path of OpenGL hackery, and am looking for
> recommendations on good video cards support by X.org that have
> hardware accelerated OpenGL. I'll be running this on 5.3-stable. Thus
> far searches have indicated that ATI is to be avoided, NVIDIA is
> decent, and "All cards supported by the DRI open source drivers work
> fine in FreeBSD." I would hope that if a card is said to "work fine"
> actually does do hardware OpenGL. (I have a laptop with a savage
> twister [0x8d01] that works fine with X, albeit very slowly. It'd be
> nice to have that usable.).

If you want to get the best performance the obvious choice is nvidia
hardware with their proprietary kernel driver. There used to be
stability issues in the past but those seem to have been fixed. I
wouldn't say ATI is to be avoided. If you don't have/need the latest and
greatest you will get 3D support from the DRI driver (up to 9200/R280).
You can get a 9200SE/128MB for $50 or so these days, enough if you don't
want to do heavy gaming and/or pixel/vertex shader programming.

The advantage is that, while performance is not as good as with nvidia
gear, you still have a 100% open source kernel and can get to the code
if needed. This might be important for some people, not so relevant for
end users. ATI used to have better 2D quality but this seems to have
changed, and nvidia now actually cares about image quality (I remember
the image quality of my old TNT to be really awful when compared to a
PCI Matrox card)

> If people would care to bounce me a dmesg or hardware description,
> X/Mesa/etc. versions and some glxgears framerates (csdemo framerates
> would be even better), that'd be much appreciated. I'd prefer to not
> have a completely frankensteined system, but if I need to be running
> some package straight out of CVS, then so be it.

For nvidia, use their kernel and X driver, for others Xorg should
provide the 3D support. I don't know about the Savage card, but if Xorg
supports the DRI part you should get 3D acceleration. Some cards only
have 2D support with sometimes Xv as well.


Cheers,
-- 
	Miguel Mendez <flynn at energyhq.es.eu.org> | Extreme ways are back again
	http://www.energyhq.es.eu.org            | Extreme places I didn't know
	PGP Key: 0xDC8514F1                      | I broke everything new again
	Note: All HTML mail goes to /dev/null    | Everything that I'd owned

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