Dual head AGP video card recommendations
Peter Eddy
petere at atg.com
Sat Apr 24 15:26:25 UTC 2004
Peter Boy wrote:
> Does the Matrox run in DVI configuration with the open source XFree
> driver or do I need the binary Matrox (still-in-beta-for-several-years)
> driver?
I don't have an answer to the DVI question, but I do have a comment
about Matrox dual-head cards in general. I have two machines that are
both dual head. One uses a dual head Matrox G450 card and the other uses
an nVidia GeForce2 MX 100 and an Intel i810.
The Matrox requires those perpetually in beta drivers to run in xinerama
mode (or at least run will, as far as I can tell) while the other
configuration with the two different cards doesn't require any special
drivers.
As I think others have commented, with any dual-head XFree configuration
I know of you're probably going to have to give up direct rendering and
have to live with being able to view motion-video (like DVDs) on only
one "head." Of course, for some people the extra screen real estate is
worth the trade off.
One more thing worth mentioning, if you use KDE then you may not be
happy with its font rendering on a dual-head machine. Gnome is ok, but
with KDE you really need to turn off the font server (xfs) and specify
font paths in XF86Config directly, even then though KTerm fonts are awful.
Peter
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