[plug] vid card and resolutions

[Matt Kemner]

On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Neil Hunt wrote:

>   I can see pics fine but only 256 colours in X (I have 24 bit in Windoze)

You may want to try the "Options Linear" option in your XF86Config.. This
allowed me to get my old Cirrus Logic to work at 32bpp (albeit slowly.. at
least compared to the ET6000 I have now :)

You want to put the option in the "Graphics Device" Section:

Section "Device"
	Identifier "Cirrus Logic"
	VendorName "Unknown"
	BoardName  "Unknown"
	#VideoRam  "2048"
	Ramdac     "normal"
	Option     "Linear"
EndSection

(that's from one of my old XF86Config files I had lying around as a
backup, from the days I had a cirrus logic)

 - Matt

P.S. The number of colours you can see at a given resolution is exactly
proportional to the amount of video RAM you have.
you can find out exactly how much vidRAM you need for a given resolution &
colours by multiplying them out:
eg if you want to display 1024x768 at 24 bit colour,
you want to display 1024 * 768 pixels (786,432 pixels) each using 24 bits
of information (3 bytes)
so that makes 1024 * 768 * 3 = 2359296 bytes = 2.25MB

I actually bought my ET6000 because it was advertised as having 2.25MB of
MDRAM, so I thought I could run this resolution.. but later found out I
was lied to cos it only has 2MB (which _just_ isn't enough for that reso,
but enough to run 1152x900 at 16 bpp, which is more than enough for me)