Recommend a video card?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| DVI implies not old.
| Open Source 3D implies old as far as I can tell.

The two "old"s are different.

I have ATI 9000 and 9250 cards with DVI connectors.  Both are quite
well supported by open (community written) drivers.  These are the
last cards for which ATI released good specs (as I understand it).
Not 100%: TVout is only supported by a hack, one that isn't adopted by
xorg.

| Cheap implies old or at least low end which often implies no DVI.

My 9250 cards cost $20 or $30 (I'm a bargain hunter).

| You can get ATI 9200 cards (AGP or PCI) with 128MB refurbished from
| ATI's online store, although they are VGA only, not DVI.  The open
| source driver for that may be functional for what you want.

Example of an AGP card that is probably available (they might be out
of stock):
http://www.factorydirect.ca/catalog/product_spec.php?pcode=AT0925

| The R3xx based cards (9500 to X8xx) seem to be starting to work, but not
| fully for some features.  So perhaps a 9550 or something (also available
| refurbished) is an option.  They do have VGA and DVI it appears.

I wonder how well that is going.  I'm conservative about this, but 
hopeful.  It is actually in recently released version of xorg.  Note: all 
this support appears to be the fruit of reverse engineering.

The nouveau project aims to create the first open-source 3d support
for nVidia cards.  Early days:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage

My impressions:

- The kind of bus affects your choice (PCI, AGP, or PCIe, in
  historical order).

- If you need dual-link DVI (unlikely), only newer cards will do.

- for open source drivers, ATI cards up to 9250 are good: they
  actually have 3d acceleration.  Dual head support.

- at least until recently, open source drivers did not support ATI
  X1000 series at all (well, the VESA driver would, but only at
  BIOS-supported resolutions, and there is no hack equivalent to
  915resolution)

- most or all nVidia cards are well supported in 2d by open
  source drivers.  No 3d support.  No dual head (I think).

- nVidia proprietary drivers seem to be better than ATI proprietary
  drivers

My experiences have been mixed.  I recently tried proprietary drivers
for the first time.  I was trying to get TVout working on a Myth box
(with only PCI slots).  The built-in Intel video controller didn't
have a composite out (for TV).  I tried both the ATI Radeon 9250 and
an nVidia FX 5200 plus cards.

- open-source nVidia seemed like a bad idea: hardware acceleration
  (not available with the open source driver) seemed useful for
  decoding MPEG-2 videos.  Also, no TVout option as far as I know.
  Note: I didn't actually test this option.

- the closed source nVidia driver worked reasonably well for a while.
  There was a bit of herring-bone pattern artifact on the TV.  Then,
  just after the start of the year, the X server started hanging
  during the playing of videos (perhaps 10 minutes in).  This appeared
  to be from some Ubuntu update that I installed after Christmas.
  Debugging the closed source driver was not easy.  I gave up.

- the closed source ATI driver almost worked.  Unfortunately there was
  a bug whereby the Xv overlay was stretched and truncated.  No fix
  will be forthcoming because more recent ATI drivers (since last
  summer) no longer support the 9250.

- I ended up with the standard open source ATI driver + a patch from
  Gatos to do TV out.
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