This is a bit off-topic. I have two video cards in linux PCs: S3 Virge
with 4Mb RAM and ATI 3d Rage II+DVD with 2 Mb (both PCI), one in my
current job, the other in my next job. I would like to know which is the
best card, S3 Virge or ATI Rage, to exchange cards and keep the best in my
new job.
Also I have been trying to determine video capabilities, and both cards
seems not support acelerated blitting, page flip or hardware surfaces.–
Roger D. Vargas
Of Roger D. Vargas
This is a bit off-topic. I have two video cards in linux PCs: S3 Virge
with 4Mb RAM and ATI 3d Rage II+DVD with 2 Mb (both PCI), one in my
current job, the other in my next job. I would like to know which is the
best card, S3 Virge or ATI Rage, to exchange cards and keep the best in my
new job.
Also I have been trying to determine video capabilities, and both cards
seems not support acelerated blitting, page flip or hardware surfaces.
Well, speaking form having esperience with both of those cards, neither of
them are very fast, nor do they do 3D very well (or in the case of the
Virge, practically non-existant.) So don’t base your choice on any 3D
capabilities, because they are both rather pitiful. I do know that Linux
supports both of these cards rather well. So what you should do is choose
the one with the larger amount of video memory. IIRC, the video memory on
the RAGEII card should be upgradeable with a laptop-style memory module that
you can get off any dead video card that uses that style (I think only
present on ATI RageII and Rage Pro.) The S3 cards always seem to have
soldered on memory chips.(Side note, I could at least play FF7PC on the RageII card(4MB), slow but it
played. Can’t say the same about the Virge.)
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com----- Original Message -----
From: owner-sdl@lokigames.com [mailto:owner-sdl at lokigames.com]On Behalf
Sent: May 7, 2001 2:16 PM
To: sdl at lokigames.com
Subject: [SDL] Choosing video card
quite slow too, only reason why I still have it plugged inside my computer
is the video capabilities.
Correction: Video capabilities here mean hardware MPEG-decoding.
Actually, the rageII+ (not rageII) has the motion prediction component in
hardware. This feature is also present in the Rage Pro. The Rage 128 added
the iDCT so mpeg would be more assisted by hardware. However, NONE of these
cards, nor any other card that I know of have a full-fledged MPEG decoder on
them due to licensing issues. (If they had a full Mpeg2 decoder on them,
they would have to be paying someone royalties.)
(IIRC, there are 3 “hardware assisted” mpeg features, YUV->RGB
conversion(The only feature that Voodoo3’s have), motion prediction(ATI,S3
and Intel), iDCT (ATI,S3,and Intel), of which I think S3 didn’t put the
features in untill the Savage line of chips.)
(BTW, YUV->RGB conversion is also known as “Video Overlay”, which just about
every 2D PCI card is supposed to have. It’s also used to display live video
from a cable tuner/webcam/capture card. )
And chances are that you can’t use any of the hardware-mpeg-assisting
features under linux anyways. (Or can you?)_________________________________________________________
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