[plug] PCI VGA cards

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 21:51, Chris Caston wrote:

> I honesty think I've have to see a side-by-side demo

OK. Next time I see you at CA I'll be happy to set one up. Say... my
laptop (very slow video, icky), an S3 based machine (even slower), a
Matrox-based machine (should be fairly snappy) and something fast if I
can find it. Ideally my desktop, but for the practicalities of getting
it there. I can run them all over remote X to equalize any disk
performance issues and help reduce the CPU/RAM impact a little.

Please note that "video card" in this case includes "quality and
performance of XFree86 drivers for that video card" - as you can't
really separate them out without testing across different OSes. Anyway,
if you'll be using XFree86 with the card in the end, who cares if it's
faster under another OS.

> * faster harddrives (I ALWAYS notice the difference)

Absolutely - far too many people entirely neglect the massive
performance and responsiveness effects of good disk(s).

> * faster nics (gigabit)

Depends on what you're doing. For X11 thin clients, for example, 10mbit
is often fine - though 100mbit seems to help.

> Video cards and faster processors don't really woo me I tend to get
> inbuilt video and the cheapest Athlon :)

Your built-in video may still be reasonably fast, though. Better
built-in video chips have some dedicated video memory, and may perform
quite acceptably in 2D. Try dropping in a Trident video card, an S3
Trio32/64, or an S3 Trio3D and see what the effect on your system's GUI
responsiveness is.

> I would also take drivers into consideration (although I've never used a
> video card that Kudzu didn't detect) a better driver will get full use
> out of the hardware especially if it works with the kernel you want.

Definitely. Drivers may well be more important to video performance,
under Linux, than the card its self. In particular, the first free
driver to support hardware-accelerated RENDER will probably result in a
massive improvement.

Craig Ringer