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  • From: Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] video cards for Linux - my tests
  • Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 13:32:14 -0500 (EST)

My ideal card would have an accel X server, be fast, work with svgalib,
have at least 2M RAM, work with all my monitors, and be compatible with a
Hercules Graphics card in the same computer. Unfortunately all my cards
seem rather dependent on both hardware and software.

Hardware:

1. AGP cards (S3 Trio3D with 4M RAM) - not compatible with Hercules card.
It must use the same area of ROM or something.

2. Speed. Most of our cards ran at 112K in an Intel P133 computer.
We tested with whatvga2, a freeware diagnostic program for DOS (which
won't work at all with Tseng cards or one of our Cirrus cards, and
displays some modes with 16M colors as greyscale tho they work in
programs). In the AMD K6-300 they ran at 69-70K. The Diamond Stealht
with paper pasted over the video chip ran at 53/47K. The Trident and
Tseng, oddlu enough, were much faster in the AMD - up from 77K to 142K for
the Tseng and 135K for the Trident.

The Tseng, with 2M RAM, only uses 1M of it in VESA mode (fewer colors).

3. Monitor. We have two monitors that won't display more than 800 res
with S3 cards but will do 1024 or 1280 with Trident card. (NCR and
Microscan). The S3 cards all display 1280 on a small Compaq, but this
monitor will only do up to 800 or 1024 with Trio#d, ATI Mach64, the
Trident Providia, 1 of our 2 Alliance and 2 of our Cirrus cards. I
eventually figured out that it works with only certain modes (107-114 on
the newer cards, 58-71 on the older cards but possibly not for 320 res)
and will NOT work with 100-107 modes. So you need to match the card to
the monitor. One card will display the higher resolutions at higher but
not lower numbers of colors (32K-16M works okay, 16 colors does not)

The older cards are more likely to use the resolutions that work with our
Compaq, for instance two Cirrus cards that do 1280 work at 1280, but one
that does 1600 won't work even at 1152.


Software
1. SVGAlib programs.
a. Ghostscfipt - Trident and Tseng will do 255 colors with DOS ghoscript
but NONE of our cards will do lvga256 with Linux ghostscript for console.
I have not tried xpdf or ghostview with them.
b. Seejpeg won't display with most of our cards. It DOES work with ALL
the S3 cards (which all also do 1600), with the newere Aliiance (that
does 1600), with three Cirrsu cards (but the newest one does blu jpegs),
and it will display gifs but not jpegs with the Tseng. Other cards give
messages about not finding any modes for 256 colors.

2. X servers - accel servers availalbe for ATI Mach 64 and for some of
the S3 card - S3 801/805 (older, 1M), probably Trio32 (?), and according
to Steven for Trio64(V+) but I just got error messages, possibly because
of my monitor settings not handling the video card mode output.
Some Virge cards work with s3v but mine did not The other S3 cards use
Xsvga which I have no got to work with truecolor.

3. Xvesa -xfbdev tinyX and Kdrive
Kdrive requires Vesa 1.2 and the others VESa 2.0. I have not got this
working yet. VESA 2.0 cards are my AGP Trio3d, Trio64Virge, and the
unknown Diamond Stealth card that do 1600 and have 4M RAM.

Dates

They are probably the newest cards but are not dated. The dated cards are
the Trident and Tseng (1996) and Aliiance (1995 and 1994). The older
cards (of the Cirrus and Aliiance) are more likely to work better with
older monitors at the higher reoslutions.


I will probably put a Trident or a Tseng in the AMD and an S3 in the
second computer for my office so that I can have the advantages of speed
in one computter (and colors in PDF files without needing to use the very
slow xpdf - it takes 5 sec to display each page or 10 sec to magnify it at
133MHz, when gs takes 2 sec on a 486). The S3 Trio64 should give
Truecolor in linux (without learning frame buffers) and work on different
monitors. It will take some exeprimenting to get it all right. I have
two offices with two comptuers each. Our next computer is a Celeron
(which came with very slow SiS onboard video - 15K) and then a Cyrix and
an older Intel.

Let me know if you want any model numbers off my card or a list of modes
supported by anything I own.

Someone just gave us yet another 56K Winmodem ;=(. USR, which is listed
at the linmodem site as not having ANY linux support.

Sindi Keesan





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