15 Dec
2005
15 Dec
'05
12:03 a.m.
Matrox G400 - the most well-supported, most stable X11 drivers that
are available.
Yea, it won't give you insane framerates with OpenGL. But if you are
looking for a 3D capable card, with awesome drivers, there is no
substitute.
It not only won't give you insane framerates, it won't give you livable
framerates on a lot of stuff. FlightGear, for instance, is unusable
on either a Matrox G400 or a G550 (unless you like 2-4 frames per second
on an Athlon XP 2000+ box). Then, on top of that, in OpenGL scenes that
involve lots of detailed texturing on lots of polys, both G400 and G550
users have routinely reported full system hard lockups with DMA idle
timeouts (see the BTS for XF86, X.org, freedesktop.org, the DRI project,
and the forums at Matrox for more). But don't bother mentioning any of
the above to Matrox -- they'll simply tell you that however free their
drivers may be, OpenGL is *not supported in Linux*, and any OpenGL
problems you have, you're on your own. That right there is a
showstopper. I bought a Matrox card *because* of the open drivers;
when their response to my hard lockup problems was "we don't support
OpenGL on Linux", I ended up feeling like I'd been taken.
-c