Graphics card with open source 3D support on AGP x8
Hi,
My old graphics card is broken . I would like to ask for an advice what graphics card to buy for good Linux support. My motherboard has AGP x8 slot . I use mainly desktop application but my son likes to play some 3D games, so I need some better or worse 3D support (It would be good if 3D support is better for a reasonable price). I would like to have a good suspend / hibernation support. My experience with an old card is that it had been supported well for some time on proprietary drivers then when my card becomes old there were some problems with strange artifacts on the screen on new KMS kernels and hibernation stopped to work. So I would like to buy a card with a good 3D support with open source drivers. It would be good if there is a high efficient closed source driver, but I am sure that support for the closed driver is going to finish sooner or later, so the open source 3D support for now is a priority for me. I am going to buy probably AMD/ATI card but I don't know. I am open for suggestions. |
the only driver i know for a fact works is my VERY OLD nvidia Gforce 2 mx 400
it USED TO USE , no longer supported used to use the 96 nvidia driver it runs well with the open nouveau driver for the OLD ati cards DON'T there was not much opengl support there WAS a LOT of Microsoft ONLY Direct X support on the old ATI cards for old AGP cards use nvidia but be warned the gforce 5 and older are NOT in support any longer |
@John VV Thanks for the fast reply.
Do you use (you know) a NVIDIA card that has good supported closed drivers and open source drivers with 3D support ? Actually I used an ATI R300 based card - that card was spoilt. It was good supported by open source drivers with 3D. If we mention NVidia gfx cards. I started to use old NVidia gfx card in home, and I have some artifacts while scrolling in KDE on the plasma desktop. Starting with SUSE 12.1 the suspend and hibernation stopped to work. I have one rather new NViDia gfx card in my work [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430]. I had upgraded recently the Nvidia proprietary driver to x11-video-nvidiaG02-295.40-15.1.i586 and OpenGL stopped to work. I cannot easy withdraw the changes because the old driver was removed from Nvidia OpenSuSE repository. The X-server even before "the upgrade" once for a week had strange freezes. Nothing worked to unfreeze: I needed to restart whole computer. (Even remote chvt command did not manage to work) Intel cards in desktop computer in my work sometimes left artifacts on the screen, and despite many driver upgrades, they still do. So I don't have reasonably bad feeling about AMD/ATI, but maybe I am missing something :D. The spoilt ATI card used to be very HOT, even I did not do anything that should utilize its power. Probably the power management of this card was poor on open source drivers. |
on older cards nvidia was better supported
a lot of the older ATI cards did not support opengl 2 well . nvidia still has support for gforce5 ( the fx cards) but for older Xorg like rhel5 and 6 using the 173 driver for say fedora 16 or 17 i do not know of any old agp that will work with the proprietary driver and the OLD cards will not work with the opensource nouveau one and the NEW xorg the old 10+ year old gforce5 and earlier cards are well 10+ years old Quote:
IS causing problems for some you can always use the 295.20 .run driver see the opensuse wiki page " the hard way" ( it is NOT hard ) http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way --- i have been using the *.run for years and years - you just need to pay attention to system changes. |
I have installed this card in one of my older computers: Sparkle 8400GS PCI with a NVIDIA 8400GS GPU.
Decent AGP cards are very hard to get nowadays. I installed this one because I needed hardware H264 decoding. Since the GPU is fairly modern, it should provide a decent 3D performance. YOu might want to check on that. This card is PCI, so transfer speed is somewhat limited. I am not sure how much you need, most work is done by the GPU and I don't know how much this limit the bandwidth needed. It is more efficient than having the CPU calculating everything and send it over the bus. The card is dirt cheap and well supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. jlinkels |
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@ digital-infinity- what distro are you running,a nd what R300 AGP card were you running before?
Sorry, I'm no help with hibernate/suspend, I never use them. As for cards, its pretty hard to find good AGP cards now (like jlinkels said). That varies with your location, and I'm sorry but I dotn know anywhere in poland that you could source a good AGP card from. So you'll probably be looking for 2nd hand cards. But I'd go looking for what is avaible and then decide what you want, rather than asking here and trying to find card XXXX-XX. ;) ATI/AMD is an option IMO. Pretty much all the ATI/AMD cards will be open source drivers only, even the few AGP HD 2XXX-> HD 4XXX cards with current closed drivers have no offical support from ATI/AMD (though it might be possible to get them running with those drivers, its not certain). They also have a PCIe-> AGP bridge, which can be a pain and is probably a good part of why they have no offical linux support with the closed drivers. As for as nVidia goes, GF2-GF4 cards (using 96.XX drivers) and GF-FX/GF5XXX (using 173.XX drivers) can still run closed or open drivers depending on your distro. GF6XXX-GF7XXX AGP cards are suported by the open source and current closed nVidia drivers. The fastest of the nVidia AGP cards are the 6XXX and 7XXX cards. I'd avoid _all_ the 'bottom of the range' AGP cards, like GF-FX 5200/5300, GF6200, GF 7100/7200/7300, they tend to be slow, eat some system memory, and crap overall. GF6150SEs like in youir system at work is similar in quality to the 6200, and see how well that one runs (its not the 1st time I've heard of driver problems with the bottom end cards). BTW artifacting can be caused by a lot of things- dodgy drivers, overheating, chip damage and really 'bad' video adapters are the most common causes. Quote:
From what I've seen your a Red Hat/CentOS/Fedroa user John VV, and Fedora is one of the worst distros to try to run an older nVidia card with due to the 'upgrade xorg to the newest possible version' policy of fedora and the way that nVidia can be _very_ slow to get the 'legacy' drivers updated to work with newer xorg versions. Quote:
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I think I'm going to have a go build a test system or 2, gawds only know I've got enough AGP cards still around here and systems to install them in. Quote:
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Some of the older AGP cards are faster than the 8400GS. The 6600GT is a little faster, 6800 is a little faster again, 7600GT+ is a lot faster. I wouldnt call PCI 8400GS card dirt cheap, but I dont know how much you paid. The cheapest I've seen them go for recently is $75+ US, which isnt cheap in my book. |
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IIRC I paid about $49 for my card at Amazon.com. I am not surprised seeing older PCI technology increasing in price. jlinkels |
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I wouldnt be suprised about the 'speed/feature set' thing. It always happens...'family' features like pure video/VDPAU tend to get introduced when that chip series comes in. As always there are faster chips and slower chips from every series of chips. So a GF4 Ti 4600 will not have 'pure video' but will be faster than a FX 5200/5300/5500/5600 with pure video. Quote:
After a quick look though, I wouldnt get a 8400GS now, unless the budget was very tight, and VDPAU was a requirement. You can get newer, better cards like G210s (better for VDPAU features as well as power consumption an heat output) for not much more than the 8400GS. If VDPAU wasnt required, or someone didnt mind risking possible problems with XvBA (ATI/AMD hardware video decoding) I'd get a PCI HD 5450. The HD 5450 is faster than a 8400GS, uses less power, and runs cooler. Win/win/win. :D |
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I am currently out for a few days and I cannot check what that ATI R300 AGP card were. Quote:
I don't know if the specifications are correct, because I found a lot of mistakes in the spec from this price searching engine. Quote:
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I am aware that the AMD cards could be a good solution in long term (because open source drivers) despite maybe current not good 3D efficiency. The NVidia closed drivers are probably better for now in terms of 3D speed, but in the future they going to stop work with newest kernels/distros (Maybe I should just recompile the distro in the future or stick with compilation distro like Gentoo). Quote:
The artifacts of my current substitute old NVidia card at home looks like the same problem (the drivers), because only KDE plasma desktop widgets when scrolled leaves some traces of previous widget content on the screen. |
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I've tried gentoo on low spec machines in the hope that it would increase perforamnce..and it did..a tiny bit. Not worth botherign with IMO. The closed soruce drivers from nVidia should be supported for a while. Closed source drivers for ATI/AMD 2XXX-> 4XXX cards will probably be dropped in a year or two. IMO its not a big problem, even with newer cards (8800GT, 9800GT) the nouveau drivers can faster, and in general the drivers arent that different in speed. I havent seen any testing comparing closed source and open soruce ATI/AMD drivers on 'older' cards like 2XXX-> 4XXX, but I wouldnt be suprised if they ended up being just as fast as the closed drivers as well. Quote:
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If it was just down to that list, I'd either get the FX-5200 or FX-5500, if you want to get the cheapest card you can. The 3450 and 3650s would be the fastest cards there. Its possible that you would have power supply issues ith the 3650 or FX-5500, they use more power than the nVidia 5200/6200 ATI/AMD 3450 cards, or the GF-4MX440 you had before. Quote:
BTW, I've run KDE 4.X with GF4-MX440, GF4-Ti4200, GF-6600GT, and later cards. The GF4-MX was peretty horrid, the GF4-Ti4200 was better, the GF-6600GT ran pretty much as well as the later 8XXX and higher cards I've used with KDE 4.X. That was an early version (4.1/4.2 IIRC) so things may have changed a little. |
Hi,
@Cascade9, @jlinkels, @John VV thanks you for valuable discussion :D . Specially Cascade9 suggestions give me a great outlook at old AGP and GFX cards efficiency and their potential problems. I decided to look for occasions to buy a second hand PCI-Express motherboard or system and to get an old inexpensive AGP card in the meantime. To summarize whole discussion: All current (one or two years old) graphic cards should have 3D support in Linux by open source drivers. To have a better 3D efficiency one should use closed drivers. Old NVIDIA cards are supported longer by closed drivers then their equivalent (similarly old) AMD/ATI cards. The low end old AGP NVIDIA cards could have some memory related problems on closed drivers while using 3D, so buying some 6XXX/7XXX card is recommended. Quote:
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I havent checked with AGP cards, but I have seen tests where older PCIe cards (8800GT/9800GT in particular) get better 3D with the open source drivers. Quote:
Aside from dodgy 'low end' hardware the only issue with older nVidia AGP cards is that the drivers are updated very slowly, if they are updated at all. The 173.XX drivers (GF5/FX) and 96.XX drivers (GF2-GF4) are at least 6 months behind xorg releases. So once a new version of xorg is released, it will take at least 6 months for the cards to get newer drivers that support the newer xorg. 71.XX drivers (Vanta, Riva, TNT/TNT2, GF1, GF3) are not updated for newer xorg versions at all, and havent been for several years now. |
all i know is the old box i have with a nvidia gforce2 mx 400 will NOT run using the 96.run on cent/Scientific linux 6
xorg on it is TO NEW the nouveau is the ONLY one that works now on CentOS 5.6 (and 5.8 should also work)the 96.run worked fine NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.20-pkg1.run the last one and it is dated "07/20/2011" ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/96.43.20/ |
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The second reason I think so is because a NVidia in my computer at the work. When the composition by "Open GL" are switched on (no "XRenderer" composition) and I use desktop for a long time without logout and login again, once for some time the inner part of the big windows tends to be black (without any contents). The contents of small windows are all right. To fix the problem I need to switch off the composition in KDE and switch on again (or relogin). I think it is something related with graphics memory fragmentation or something like that. It happens on my workstation computer with a NVidia card Code:
nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) The openGL on this card works again after some recent OpenSuSE updates. Quote:
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