On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 10:18:02AM +0200, Hans du Plooy wrote:
On Sat, 2005-05-14 at 02:30 -0700, John Bailo wrote:
Sorry, but I went from a dog Radeon 9200 to a stellar GeForce FX5200.
Guys, you get good graphics card manufacturers, and you get bad graphics card manufacturers.
I had a Gainward TNT2 many years ago, which was a fabulous card. Apart from a few nvidia driver issues (which they still haven't fixed, by the way), I didn't have any complaints.
The driver issues did bug me though, and thinking it was the card, I replaced it, and in the space of a year went through a number of different TNT and GeForce cards, with similar results. However, on some cards, getting the nVidia drivers two work was a real pain, and none of those cards were cutting edge new.
This box I'm typing from was the first computer I ever bought. It's an HP Pavilion, with a Pentium 3 733 MHz processor, came with an Nvidia "Vanta" although the box says TNT2 with 16 MBs, and it works in like every OS including Free BSD, and SUSE finds it no prblem and I grab the drivers with YAST, and then I can play Tux Racer. The box next to me right now is my gaming box, it has a 128 MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 which I use for Quake 3, UT, UT 2003, UT 2004, UT2, Wolfenstien, Quake (All), and every version of Doom. It works fine although ti does lag on Doom 3, I need a better card for it. In Linux, the card works great without a stop. My laptop, I paid the money to get the Nvidia card in it. It's an Nvidia Ge Force 5200 GO. 32 MBs. Plays Doom fine, Doom 2, Final Doom, UT, Wolfenstien, and is running SUSE 8.2 Professional. Funny how SUSE can work on hardware newer than it. HEhe.
Eventually I bought a Gigabyte Radeon 7000 card, and was blown away by it. Plugged it in, Yast said howzit, and my 3D worked. What's more, all the issues I had with the nVidia cards went away, and image quality was far better than what I was used to.
The Radeon 7000 is only slightly faster than a TNT2, and when I needed more power I bought a Radon 7500. Unfortunately I decided not to spend the little extra for a Gigabyte card, and bought from PowerColor. Mistake. While setting it up was still a plugin-and-forget affair, and image quality is still good, performance is poor compared to what I see on other brands, and the firmware is buggy - for example when the card is cold, POST screen is corrupted (firmware issue confirmed by PowerColor support, they just never did anything about it). To make matters worse, this card started to fail after a only about two years.
Now I'm back on nVidia again, I've been through a number of GeForce based cards, from a MX4000 through to a FX5700. For the first time in a few years Yast can't detect my screen properly. I'm having a lot of trouble getting the driver loaded, and every so often I have to wipe my tmp directories or X won't start.
Right now I have an old Gainward GeForce2 GTS which works well. It has nothing on the ATi cards for image quality, but at least it's fast - faster than any ofthe MX based cards and faster than a few lower FX cards too.
So you get good nVidia cards and you get really horrible nVidia cards You get good ATI cards and you get really horrible ATI cards.
Take your pick
-- Hans du Plooy SagacIT (Pty) Ltd hansdp at sagacit dot com
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