Graphics card recommendation?

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Mon Jun 1 23:21:30 UTC 2009


Joonas Sarajärvi wrote:
> There are cheap models in both Nvidia's and AMD/Ati's product ranges.

But don't buy NVidia! Proprietary drivers only cause problems.

>> 3. Works under Fedora-10, if possible as is.
> I'd go with a AMD/Ati card due to AMD's effort to bring quality open
> source drivers to the community. Currently new RadeonHD cards will
> work quite nicely,

Not really, because as you say...

> but especially on Fedora 10 there is little hardware acceleration offered.

... so why are you recommending them? There's in fact no OpenGL support for
Radeon HD cards yet in the drivers shipped with Fedora and there's no
definite time frame when it'll be available. (The DRI upstream project
claims an ETA of H1/2009 for first working snapshots, but said first half
is almost over and I have yet to see anything usable.)

In addition, most Radeon HD cards are expensive, he's asking for something
cheap.

The right choice is to pick one of the older ATI models (up to X1950), see:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon
All except the r100 (Radeon 7000/VE) series have texturing, clipping and
lighting (TCL) support.

Also note that the cited Asus K8V-MX motherboard has an AGP port and no
PCI-Express ports, so the right choice is an AGP card, not a PCI-Express
card.

A Radeon 9250 might end up being the best choice, it's not the most powerful
graphics card out there, but it's cheap, it does have a TCL engine and 3D
acceleration just works.

        Kevin Kofler




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