Date: 20 Feb 2003 14:04:47 -0800 From: Eric Anholt <eta@lclark.edu> To: Andrew J Caines <A.J.Caines@halplant.com> Cc: FreeBSD Multimedia <FreeBSD-Multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Video card with 3D hardware acceleration - advice sought Message-ID: <1045778686.702.34.camel@leguin> In-Reply-To: <20030220205220.GH61591@hal9000.halplant.com> References: <20030220205220.GH61591@hal9000.halplant.com>
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On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 12:52, Andrew J Caines wrote: > Short > ===== > > What's the best 2D/3D AGP card under $100 which will work with my old PC > running STABLE and do hardware 3D stuff with as many OpenGL whizzbangs as > possible so I can play QuakeWorld better? > > The ATI Radeon 7500 (64MB) looks good at around $75, but for $10 more I > can get a 9000 PRO (128MB) on special offer. Should get that and wait for > XFree86 4.3? I bought my 7500 for $75 with shiping a year ago. You should be able to find a much better deal than that. I personally recommend the ATI cards. They're the fastest cards with open-source support. The 8500 is supported quite well in DRI CVS and the soon-to-be-released XFree86 4.3.0 (due in about a week barring critical problems, and to be in ports not too long after that). The 9000 works for some and fails terribly for others. [snip] > ..and may require or (optionally) include.. > > o Glide (glide3 port) > o DRI (dri-devel port) > o DRM (drm-kmod port) > o Vendor driver (eg. ATI has linux XF86 drivers[2]) > o XFree86 4.3 (or available 4.2.99.902 FreeBSD binary distro) Glide is for 3dfx cards only. dri-devel is an old snapshot of DRI CVS which includes radeon 8500 support. drm-kmod is a port of the drm shipped with XFree86 4.2.0 plus some bugfixes and is unnecessary for FreeBSD 5.0 and later (it's integrated into the system). Do not use vendor drivers, unless you have nvidia, in which case you have no other option. > I'd prefer to.. > > o use the fewest components possible (eg. just XF86) > o use "native" or "bundled" components > o use a reasonably stable driver > o know that it's working for someone with hardware like mine > o support a vendor who deals well with the open source community[3] > o get the whizziest card without paying more for extras I can't use > o get a Radeon since there are plenty on the shelves I have personally used XF86 4.2.0 for Matrox G400, Rage 128 Mobility M4, Rage 128 Pro, Radeon 64MB VIVO, Radeon 7500, and 3dfx Voodoo 3 and 5. With pre-XF86 4.3 I've also been using the Radeon 8500. > Since I'm currently running XF86 4.2.1, I see that I have driver modules > for the Radeon (radeon_drv.o and radeon_dri.so) and that the docs[4][5] > suggest that the 7500[6] and 8500[7] are supported. Unfortunately, there > are many things I still don't understand which make the decision process > even more difficult, including: > > o What is the 2x, 4x AGP and 2x bus stuff? > eg. are these like CD-ROM speeds and indicate capacity, or are > they incompatible technologies (and if so what do I have/need) You don't need to worry about them. You probably only have 1x support on your board (1x is the default used), and higher speeds generally make things unstable for people. > o Do I need or have AGP GART? > agp(4) says the driver isn't needed for my HW (I have a > 82443LX/EX "PCI to AGP Bridge", not a 82443GX "host-to-AGP > bridge". Do I have it for the Radeon[8]? For non-3dfx, you need AGP. That hardware should work just fine with the agp driver. > o What's the discrepancy between DRI support on Linux and FreeBSD? > From the information available[8] it seems like FreeBSD > is SOL, but other information[9] suggest otherwise, though it's > not clear to me what the current support status is on FreeBSD. XFree86 documentation is almost always out of date. I try to keep FreeBSD support on par with Linux. The major hardware we don't support that linux does right now are the i8x0 integrated chips. > o What do I actually need to install? > What XF86 version and components, what ports and what other > stuff - DRI, DRM, Glide, ... is needed to make hardware 3D > things work on my system? Read install.html from my website, I think it's complete. -- Eric Anholt eta@lclark.edu http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/ anholt@FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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