[lug] video card recommandation for 1680x1050?

[steve at badcheese.com]

I've had great success with linux, the closed-source nvidia driver and 
many different nvidia cards.  However, the card's memory has a lot to do 
with the resolution that you can get accelerated full-screen video on.  If 
you want to do full-screen accelerated 3D video at big-LCD resolutions, 
you'll need a fairly recent card (7xxx or 8xxx).  The old 5xxx and 6xxx 
cards (gforce4-types) usually won't do a very good job at accelerating 
anything > 1280x1024.  If the frame buffer memory is less than the native 
resolution of your monitor, then it'll have to do page-swapping on the 
card which reduces performance dramatically.

My advice, get a modern nvidia card and use the closed-source propriatary 
drivers.  Google Earth, 3D games and other software are all very smooth 
with the closed-source driver.  If you do 3D or opengl development, it's a 
must-have.

- Steve

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Ben Burdette wrote:

> Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:57:57 -0700
> From: Ben Burdette <bburdette at comcast.net>
> Reply-To: "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List"
>     <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
> To: "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List"
>     <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
> Subject: Re: [lug] video card recommandation for 1680x1050?
> 
> dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
>>> Does anyone have video card recommendations for 1680x1050 resolution?  I'm
>>> looking for something very generic, but with better resolution than the
>>> minimal controllers built into motherboards.  (I think mine is currently
>>> only supported to 1024x768 under Linux, and 1200x1024(?) under Windows.)
>>> 
>> 
>> I'd also be interested if anybody has recently purchased and installed
>> vcard that supports 1920 x 1200 and didn't have to do a lot of proprietary
>> driver / config wrangling to make it work.  Anything working out of the
>> box these days with RH?
> I dunno about RH, but i have mine working fine with ubuntu now.  I'm using a 
> samsung 24 inch monitor and a nvidia 8800gts.  It did take some doing though 
> - the standard ubuntu driver install resulted in a non-working x.  I used a 
> script called envy, which I found here:
>
> http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
>
> People have had varying degrees of success according to the forums, but for 
> me it worked. 
> Here's an article that claims that ATI will be massively improving their 
> linux drivers in the near future.  If you're an ATI fan you might keep an eye 
> on developments there:
>
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821&num=1
>
>
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-- 
EMAIL: (h) steve at badcheese.com  WEB: http://badcheese.com/~steve