On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 10:16:44AM +0000, Edenyard wrote:

Does anyone have any recommendations for a suitable video card that would work on a Slackware 9.1 Athlon 1GHz system with kernel 2.4.22 and X version 4.3.0? The card is wanted for playing DVDs on and must have an output of some sort suitable for sending to a standard 625-line PAL (or RGB) TV system.

I know that there are tons of cards out there, but I'm concerned about getting one that is WELL supported by Linux. Also, is there any reason to choose AGP over PCI, given the use to which it will be put?

Ok, to start with your questions in reverse order. First off get AGP as finding a new PCI card is getting difficult now and you will pay a premium for it. AGP is a different bus to your PCI bus so first off you will gain a performance benefit through that, and also AGP allows for much faster data rates than PCI so you can get more data over the graphics bus, playing the game unreal tournament with AGP disabled is very painful (although this is a relatively new game and tends to torture hardware quite heavily).

Ok for choice of card you could go for either ATI or Nvidia I will write about each choice seperatly. You have missed out one vital part of the spec that you require and that is price! You could spend between 20 quid and 400 quid upwards depending on what you want, but I guess that you want to get the cheapest card that does the job well? So I would budget somewhere around 35-80 quid mark.

Also you mention RGB in the tv-out part of your spec, to do this you will need to make your own VGA to Scart/RGB cable and use custom refresh rates to drive the TV, you could possibly kill your tv doing this :) As far as I know there are no consumer gfx cards that do RGB out (they either do composite or s-video) if anyone can prove me wrong then that would be fantastic.

On ATI and Nvidia, a product based on either companies chipset will work but for it to work on an Nvidia based card you will have to use the non-free Nvidia drivers, these have worked quite well for me in the past other people have bad things to say about them and I am having trouble making them work with a 2.6 Linux kernel. there is a free driver for these cards but afaik it won't do tv-out and it isn't very fast as it doesn't offer any kind of hardware accelerations so isn't really an option. The only real reason to get an Nvidia card over an ATI is if you are doing 3d graphics work with non-free software like Shake, Maya, Houdini or you want to play Unreal Tournament 2003 in Linux. (please note when I say 'free' I mean free as in speech and not as in beer)

The other option is ATI, I don't actually own any ATI cards and have only tried using them with non-free drivers in the past to get them to work with non-free software which wasn't very successfult, so you will probably want to research the validity of my answer.

With ATI cards you also get a choice of a non-free driver which supports all the features of the cards or a free driver that supports 90% of the features of the cards or The free driver that supports 3d hardware accelerations which is a good thing. These cards also have support for TV-Out, unfortunatly I don't know anything about the radeon range and support with Linux so I would research this yourself although I would think that any ATI Radeon 9xxx card would probably fill your requirements quite well. At lest this should give you a pointer to things to google with.

Anyhow the reason I never replied to your initial query is that I don't know the answer to your question :) I was hoping that someone else would be able to answer it better than me also the way I tend to read a list is to read posts and not return to my mailbox and reread things unless the thread has got interesting. Sorry I missed out on you for this one, I figured that someone else would have a more helpful answer than I gave, and I when I read your post I kind of thought "hmmm, will see who answers that and if nobody posts I think I will", obviously I forgot :)

Thanks Adam