Video Card suggestions for Slack 13+
 

I'm looking for recommendations for a great video card for Slack 13.0 (and beyond).

Preferred budget: $100-$150 (could go a little higher if it's worth it).

After the years of the partial success with display tweaking, facedesk'ing, and now my card not being supported by the recent fglrx drivers from ATI (tried v9.12), I'd like to see what you guys n gals recommend for a video adapter.

I was able to get the fglrx working on Slack 12.2, but not on 13.0. I tried v9.12 on Slack 13, and just like a few other posts I've seen - "no suitable adapter detected" (or similar). However, that's a story for another thread (which already exists).

Current card: ATI Radeon 9600 [AGP 8x 256MB]

Current monitor display: 1920x1080 (60HZ, depth=24)
(Currently using VGA. Monitor supports DVI, but previous drivers would sucks with it, going black and having to unplug/replug/reboot to get a display again.)

Usage: Mostly web browsing, reading and writing text, etc. Some minor games, but nothing too fancy. I dual boot with winderz XP.

Thanky!

Pretty much anything by NVIDIA.

samac

I have an ATI RadeonHD 2400 Pro that works with the fglrx driver, but my monitor is old and it doesn't report the graphics mode I want to use to X...so i am using the radeon driver.

New monitor on the way and then I'll switch back.

What version of Slackware and fglrx are you using?

Edit: Whoops, now I see in your sig it shows;
ATI Radeon HD 2400Pro, Slackware64 13.

Get an NVidia card with vdpau Feature Set C support.

How does this one look? GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB - $135

That one's Feature Set A. You get full acceleration for H.264 and partial acceleration for MPEG1, MPEG2 and WMV9. Good, but you can do better :).

With a feature set C card, you'll get full (entirely-in-GPU) acceleration for MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV9 and some MPEG4 (DivX and XVid).

The feature set definitions are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

The full list of which NVidia products support which feature sets is here:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree8...ppendix-a.html

I also recommend the Nvidia GPUS. A good one with feature set C and low power consumption is the GT220. The replacement of this chipset, with better performance is the GT240. But I'm not sure if it's supported by the nvidia-linuxdrivers.
If you want more performance you could go for a GTS250. There are several "Green Editions" out there, but the cards still drain a lot more power than the GT220.
I have a 1 GB GT220 from Gigabyte. The fan is quiet, vdpau works great and I have even enough performance to kill some doom3-zombies under wine.

If you aren't going to be playing modern gpu intensive games, you really shouldn't spend more than $50-$60 on a videocard or even upgrade at all. A higher end videocard will just end burning a hole in your wallet, your electric bill, your power supply and build unnecessary heat in your case.

EDIT: To answer your question though a Radeon HD4650 or Geforce GT 220 both sound perfect for what you want. They are both cheap, low power consumption/heat and will handle light gaming for you more than fine.

I don't think fglrx drivers are as bad as everyone says they are. Nvidia has fancier OpenGL extensions and slightly better linux drivers but ATi's are still decent and I actually prefer their Windows drivers over Nvidia's.
Nvidia does have VDPAU though which is way better than ATi's alien XvBA which is useless right now. So if you watch a lot of movies in *nix, Nvidia is a better option right now.

The last version of fglrx to support your video card is 9.3, and was released in March of last year. It does not work with X server 1.6.* and higher or kernel 2.6.28.* and higher.

Hwowever, the open source drivers support 2D and 3D acceleration quite well on that video card. Based on your list of requirements, I can't help but wonder why you need a card newer than your current radeon.

However, fglrx 9.12 will work on Slackware 13.0 on any Radeon HD2xxx or higher GPU if you want to stick with AMD. A number of people suggest getting an nvidia card with vdpau support, but you didn't list high definition video play back as a requirement. And, quite frankly, I play back HD video all the time with my HD4350 with the open source drivers without any problems (and without vdpau support).

Adam

For my new build I picked up an NVIDIA 9400GT w/ 1GB for $50. I will upgrade that to one of the NVIDIA cards mentioned above as one of my next impulse buys probably, but this card does fine for youtube and desktop effects (which I'll happily waste resources on ;) ...I love KDE4) which I run fairly heavily.

I wouldn't consider anything except NVIDIA for linux, but that's just me.

You bring up some great points here.

First of all - yep you're right, oops - I didn't include video playback. I do watch *some* videos on the PC, including HD, but this isn't a big requirement. I don't think I'd use any TV-out functionality though.

I had seen a few posts about the opensource drivers, but I've seen good and bad reviews about them. I won't give up on them yet though, so thanks for mentioning that too! I've just tweaked xorg.conf a bit more per Tuning performance with xf86-video-ati, so I'll see how that goes.

Edit: Major improvement, now I feel silly... glxgears is now getting ~8 times more frames. Time will tell how stability is.


GIGABYTE GeForce GT 220 is looking like the winner if I can't get the "xf86-video-ati" to work any better. (Thanks to those who suggested that)

I am not sure which version of fglrx I was using, whatever was new about a month or two ago. It worked well but my monitor will not say it will run in 1280x1024, and it does...but trying to get the ATI driver to recognize it was too much of a hassle. I am using the radeon driver for now. It works reasonably well, but it has issues with full screen video and flash stuff.

A new monitor upgrade is coming soon, at that point I'll reinstall the ATi driver and hopefully everything will be good.

As I (may have) mentioned earlier, I had fglrx on slack 12.2 running fairly well, and also had the monitor resolution problem (including with the radeon driver). I think I fixed that by making a backup of my xorg.conf and running X -configure to generate an output, then comparing line by line and making a mix of the two. Now, although my xorg doesn't mention my resolutions at all, they're all available with the frequency settings and DPMS (I assume).

I've read about a LOT of problems with flash (in firefox). Interestingly, I have less problems with the same flash running in seamonkey - which suggests some problem between flash and firefox.

Next task for me - recompiling firefox to have the cleartype style fonts!

I just wanted to mention that evga makes a passively cooled Geforce 210. The Geforce 210 is a vdpau feature set C card. It's also very inexpensive. If you won't be using that card for gaming, then it's probably the right choice.

Also, Tom's Hardware just did their regular "Best graphics cards for the money" feature (which recommends gaming cards). Most of the NVidia cards listed support VDPau Feature Set A (H264 acceleration), which is all you actually need:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...card,2521.html