Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:44:37 -0400 From: "Andresen,Jason R." <jandrese@mitre.org> To: Christian Chen <oistrakh@earthlink.net> Cc: Kal Torak <kaltorak@quake.com.au>, FreeBSD-stable <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: nVidia Cards /w FreeBSD (3D Acceleration) Message-ID: <3AD5B145.EF09CEA4@mitre.org> References: <20010412000523.I86970-100000@pirastro.oistrakh.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Christian Chen wrote: > > On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Kal Torak wrote: > > nVidia cards are really the ONLY choice to buy now... Not that Im complaining, > > Maybe this is just *my* personal quirkiness, but does anyone else out there > feel as though ATI's 2D performance is higher quality? And by higher quality, > I don't mean _faster_, I mean _looks better_. When I replaced my nVidia > card with an ATI Rage Fury Pro, and after that a Rage Fury Maxx, the text > looked crisper, and images were sharper. Granted, these things are > irrevelant to 3D gamers, but for all those sysadmins out there, it sure > is nice having crisper console screens and xterms. > > But maybe it's just me. Lots of people don't notice 60Hz scan rate > flicker, but I do ... 2D performance, coupled with the Windows drivers has always kept me with Matrox personally. XFree-4 supports Xv with my G200 (hardware scaling rules on full motion video, especally when you have a fixed frequency 1280x1024 monitor). XFree will do Xv with newer ATI cards too IIRC, however in Windows (still have to reboot to play games and run the occasional Window-only application, like VirtualDub) the ATI drivers crash constantly and produce wierd side effects when they aren't crashing. Most notably, the backing store on the mouse pointer tends to break a lot, leaving me with an invisible mouse in Windows, and will leave blocks of garbage over any window that is updating while the cursor passes over. Matrox on the other hand as wonderful Windows drivers (Unlike ATI, I've never seen a Windows crash inside MGADRAB.DLL). 3D performance wise, the G series Matrox cards seem pretty comperable to the equivelent ATI Rage chip. The ATI cards tend to work better at lower resolutions than the Matrox cards, but the Matrox cards tend to work better at 1024x768+ resolutions in my (albiet limited) experience. You are right about the raster quality of the NVidia cards (Geforce especially). As you probably know, NVidia liceneses out their chipset (and a "reference board") to companies, and these companies do the final board design and manufacture your card. Apparently even the reference board from NVidia had rather bad raster issues, and most manufacturers weren't really set up to fix them, so they basically reproduced the reference board as is, leaving the problems in place. Also, GeForce cards are pretty expensive if all you want to do with them is sysadmin or do other 2D tasks. Warning: This paragraph is third hand information, your accuracy may vary. Finally, one really big downside for buying either card (if you are a gamer) is that they are merely tested for "compatability" by most game companies. This means it is all too common to find games tickling bugs in your card (that NEVER get fixed, because they only really care about the NVidia and 3dfx folks). I still have to downgrade my video drivers to play some games (Star Trek Armada) and then upgrade them again to play different games (Heavy Gear II), which is annoying to say the least. -- _ _ _ ___ ____ ___ ______________________________________ / \/ \ | ||_ _|| _ \|___| | Jason Andresen -- jandrese@mitre.org / /\/\ \ | | | | | |/ /|_|_ | Views expressed may not reflect those /_/ \_\|_| |_| |_|\_\|___| | of the Mitre Corporation. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3AD5B145.EF09CEA4>