I bought the best video card, a GeForce 4 Ti 4600
I finally upgraded my video card. The best
*. I've been wanting to do this since I
built
my current workstation, dancer. I did some looking around on the web
for a couple days, reading reviews, and talking to friends. I started
leaning towards an Nvidia GeForce a while ago. ATI (makers of the Radeon)
releases the specs for their cards which allows opensource drivers (for
Linux, etc.) to be produced, but they do not actually create the drivers
themselves, and 3D acceleration is not yet supported for their latest
cards under Linux. Nvidia releases binary only drivers, but apparently
has good support for Linux. It would be ideal for a manufacturer to
produce and release opensource drivers, but that doesn't happen yet.
I pretty quickly decided on a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 - the best that's
currently available. The annoying part was then deciding which
vendor to buy a packaged card from. I ended up going with
Gainward's version
because I found their dual-DVI card at a good price, and the
reviews were good. Dual-DVI means I can drive 2 LCDs digitally.
It's also got s-video and composite video input and output, so I
can play games on my TV, or record video from my VCR, etc.. I read
a gamer review of of current LCDs, and basically it said that they
suck less than they used to for games, but they're still pretty bad.
They have trails, the lighting is not great, and they're really freaking
expensive. So I expect to stick to CRTs for a while. I ordered the
card
from newegg, because that's where I saw
the good price, and much of the hardware in this
box
was ordered there, and my experiences with them have been good.
It was $278 + $17.96 2-day shipping and handling (I wanted it for
a
LAN party this weekend).
Although it's annoying that FedEx, the only shipper they use, doesn't
give me an estimated delivery date.
Since the thing can drive two monitors, I obviously had to. My main
monitor is a Viewsonic GS790 (19"). To this I added my ancient 15"(?).
I have them both running at what I believe to be their max resolutions,
1600x1200, and 1024x768, both at 32 bits. They're working as a single
seamless desktop in both Windows 98 and Linux. Windows 98 was extremely
easy to set up with the drivers that came on the CD. Linux was fairly
easy to set up - you can use one of a variety of rpms, or build from
tarballs (which I did). The multi-heading only required adding the
following lines to my /etx/X11/XF86Config-4:
Option "TwinView"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-50"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-90"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1024x768 @1024x1200; 1600x1200; 1280x1024,1024x768; 1152x864,1024x768; 1024x7
I won't explain this because it's well
documented on Nvidia's site, under Drivers (
here).
I'm really enjoying being able to drag applications from one monitor to
the other.
So far I've tested:
Linux:
Windows:
All at 1600x1200 (except tuxracer which it doesn't look like I
can set). Beautiful, all of it. Serious Sam came with the video
card, I deleted it already. Battlefield 1942 is a really cool
FPS with realistic
weapons and very nice graphics, and there are a bunch of vehicles you
can pilot. Armagetron is an implementation of the light bike game from
the movie Tron -
beautiful on this video card with all of the
graphics maxed out. If you don't know what Quake and Unreal are... who
are you and where do you come from ? Click the above links.
Yes, it's an expensive video card. But I enjoy it about as much as
anybody would, and this is only the 2nd 3D accelerator I've ever purchased
(last one was a Voodoo3). Dancer is finally complete.
* Go watch something by Pixar, my new video card is
not the best graphics engine available. Also, I hear a new ATI Radeon
9700 is going to be coming out tomorrow that will be faster, but has no
Linux support yet, and costs $111 more.
On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 16:36:25 -0700, a few days after expected, the ATI
Radeon 9700 became available for $369(+S&H), making my video card
nolonger the most powerful available. But this Radeon still doesn't
have 3D Linux support, and it costs 35% more.
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