—Robert Vargas said:----
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.-----------------------------------
I am a proud owner of a Rage II+DVD, and I have spent quite some time
playing around with it, using DirectX and its SDK toys. The reason for not
being able to get accelerated blitting, page flipping and hardware surfaces
(correct me if I’m wrong but I think those 2 former ones only work if you
have a hardware surface) is that you work with Linux. Again, correct me if
I’m wrong, but having hardware surfaces on Linux is somewhat difficult. From
experience, Rage II+ has all those capabilities…
And I completely agree with Kisai, they both suck when it comes to speed.
Only 3D-game I have gotten to work at fps > 5 is Forsaken at 320x200. 2D is
quite slow too, only reason why I still have it plugged inside my computer
is the video capabilities.
DirectX had some test program which tested all the flags you could give when
creating surfaces on a video card. Try it and try to translate all those
DDSCAPS_STRETCHBLIT -like flags to something understandable. Or wait 'til I
get home again and test them for you…
-Petri Latvala-
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.
Petri Latvala
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.)
Okay, thanks for the info. I wasn’t sure what exactly was on hardware…
And chances are that you can’t use any of the hardware-mpeg-assisting
features under linux anyways. (Or can you?)
Again some guessing. Maybe I should enclose my mails inside #ifdef
I_AM_CORRECT and #endif…
With recent software (at least for what I have found) nothing supports
hardware-assisted mpeg displaying. If there’s something lying around that
can display mpegs with anything but pure software, tell me. And for
reminding, this concerns just Linux. Windows has all the cool toys of
course. But anything is possible. It can be made. A little difficult it is,
because (wild guess) it works differently on every card that has those
features. A “Mpeg player for ATI cards” wouldn’t be that useful…
Petri Latvala
Who confesses guessing without telling it was a guess
(sorry)
Hi!!!
Talking about “Choosing video card”…
I will buy a video card in a couple of days, so… which???
Opinions about:
Ati Radeon 64Mb Vivo
Geforce2 64Mb
NOTE: main use of the card is SDL development, games, multimedia, OpenGL
Thanks… and sorry for off-topic…
With recent software (at least for what I have found) nothing supports
hardware-assisted mpeg displaying. If there’s something lying around that
can display mpegs with anything but pure software, tell me.
XFree86 4.0 has an XVideo extension which allows hardware assisted
YUV -> RGB conversion for many different video cards, and is used by
SDL and by other video applications.
See ya,
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software