Hi there,

I wasn't sure if should put this in the hardware or newbie section but it sounds like a bit of a dumb question so I've put it here.

I have a GeForce mx420 and am having all manner of ball ache tring to get it to run harware acceleration using the drivers at the Nvidia site and a few other sources with rmps, I may get it to work I may not, this is not the issue.

I wondered if there is a linux "friendly" graphics card around, I have a bit of money to spend and I am going to build a new puter specifically for linux bu I want to be able to do a bit of wine stuff and hopefully some online gaming etc so I would like to get a no hassle graphics card to work "fully" under linux.

Sorry if I have waffled on, I guess there is no hard and fast answer to this but advice would be appreciated.

BTW I have an athlon processor and intend to keep using athlon, but if anyone would recoment otherwise on that I would also be interested to know,

thanks for reading,
regards,

Draylath

The question is what you expect from that graphics card.

To get maximum 3d performance you'll need to use either
NVidia or ATI, both of which then want a non-GPLed
driver (bad idea as far as I'm concerend).

Personally, I'm quite happy with what my Radeon Mobility
in the notebook does with the open source drivers from
X and dri.sourceforge.net and I don't give an owls hoot
whether I could have my screensaver run at 1000FPS
rather than 180 ... Mozilla or any normal desktop work
wouldn't be any faster, anyway. If you want to spend
money to increase performance get a SCSI RAID, heaps
of RAM or a motherboard with faster RAM-chips ;)



Cheers,
Tink

thanks for the reply,

Yes a whole heap of improvements in terms of ram and processor power are planned.

to answer the point you raised "what do you expect from the graphics card"

I was hopeing to use it as a games platform and to try out some linux games (not too sure what i'm talking about but I hate to look and then find out I can't play) and to play said games on the internet, multiplayer etc.

Would Raidon seem to be the better option for linux. I have a frined who is a bit of a guru and he likes it. is it better in linux?

Thanks for your post tho Tinkster I will do some hcl searching on that

Well, let's say that the Radeon drivers provided
"natively" by Linux beat the living daylight out of
the NVidia counterpart. However, as pointed out
in the first response, to get the maximum performance
out of it, you'd probably need ATI's drivers instead.

Downside: ATI can only do either 2D or 3D acceleration,
which means that your desktop-performance will be
poor if you set it up for games.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for getting back to me,

so what you are saying is that there is no way to get the same kind of performance that I was used to on windoze with anything good as far as graphics hardware goes (sorry, not moaning I know this is not linux's fault but the fault of the manufaturers), I guess that what I want is to do do some gaming but to have my mpegs and DVD's playing also,

This, I guess, is what my question is, what graphics device do I need to do this? I want 2D and 3D, if there are any links or things I could look at as to how this all works might be good so I can I would appreciate that,

regards,
Draylath

Some quik advise- dont get a video card that is super brand new, development is a little slow, but the results beat windozs hands down.
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheideg...omp_oct03.html
ie google search "radeon linux benchmarks" or ati or geforce or nvidia instead of radeon

If you have a guru near you, and if you can count on his advice, you'd better go for it. Use ati.