On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 16:39, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > On 07/25 08:38 , Dave Erickson wrote: > > On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 18:45, Randy Clarksean wrote: > > > > > > Are any of you running a moderately decent video card on Suse 8 or 9? > <snip> > > Any recent NVIDIA based card. > > I disagree. I've had poor luck with those drivers. They do some nifty > things (3D acceleration across both heads, auto-detect external monitor on a > laptop); but my main problems with them are: > - they often screw up the console when switching out of X. If you ever > leave X (either shutting it down nicely, or ctrl+alt+f1); it might put > gibberish on the text console, and you might not be able to resume a sane X > session. IMHO, this is unforgiveable. > - For better or worse, they don't use large parts of the X subsystem. One of > the places this shows up is in interpreting X modelines. So if you're like > me, and have a highly-tweaked modeline on one of your monitors, it won't let > you drive it as hard. > - Xinerama support is badly emulated (again, they aren't using that part of > X). So if you have two monitors of different resolutions, the driver can't > comprehend a non-rectangular array of screens. > > > get one with dual VGA outputs and try dual monitors! > > ATIs will do this as well; in some cases they support 3D accel on both heads > (using 'mergedfb'); and there's some hope of getting a decent X driver for > ATI hardware in the future, so you're not stuck with the hassles of > binary-only drivers. > > but maybe I'm just too damn picky about my video hardware. :) > > that said; nVidia probably still has the fastest 3D accelleration under > Linux (but I don't know). so if you're willing to sacrifice everything in > the name of speed, they might still be the way to go. I can only speak to the experience I have had with these two brands. I haven't owned an ATI card since my 8MB Xpert98. I couldn't get GL to work on it at all but that was a long time ago. ;-) Since then I had a Voodoo which was nice but again, the drivers sucked. I have had 4 different NVIDIA cards in various computers since then and I have been very happy with them. I did experience the jumbled console several times but it hasn't happened for a long time. Now my Gentoo desktop has an FX5600 with dual vga's feeding 2 19" samsung's. It works really good. I first set it up as two separate desktops which only the mouse could pass between. This is good in a lot of ways because a: you don't need to use a xinerama aware window manager, b: it's cool to have different GL screensavers running on each screen, c: it's easy to set up and works real good. Now I am using twinview which is neat because it acts like one big desktop. So screensavers span both monitors, i can drag widows back and forth etc... 3d performance is absolutely perfect. Much cleaner and faster than this same hardware under WinXP. Were talking 290+ FPS @ 2304 x 864 x 24 with: 'gears -root -delay 17655 -cycles 5 -planetary -fps' Good enough for me ;-) ps, I haven't had any crashes lately so I can't comment to that. hope this help somebody. dave _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list