[H-GEN] Video Cards

[Byron Ellacott]

On Sun, 8 Feb 1998, Brenton Bills wrote:

> Check out the ET6100, it seems to be quite good from what I can gather.
> Although David will prob tell you otherwise and suggest some card that
> costs mega $$$. 
I heard vaguely something about ET6000 drivers being dodgy under
win95, but of course that wouldn't be of concern here, would it <g>

The ET6k is a good chipset, as far as I can tell .. it's very cheap
for it's performance, but as you say a card that costs a nice wad of
cash will do better :)

I'm content with my trio64 .. it does text very well <g> and my
processor has to work pretty hard to push the pixel/sec limit for
straight blitting.  Of course, it is not as fast as a decent card, but
it's widely supported, and reliable. :)

> I also think if you are planning to do alot of 3D graphics get a dedicated
> 3D card, such as the 3dfx cards that are out there. Byron seems to be the
> expert at that though.
The 3D you want determines what card you should get.  For games, get a
voodoo[2].  There is no other choice.  It's close to the top for
performance (I think the Riva 128 now outperforms the voodoo, but
voodoo2 is twice the performance of voodoo) and has a huuuge software
support base.  It's now the `standard'.  For serious 3D work, in
realtime, an Obsidian 3Dfx will give you excellent performance, but at
a price.  If you don't need realtime graphics, any dodgy old 2D card
will be sufficient.  The ViRGE is not worth it, the 3D it offers is
negligible - get a Trio64 instead :)  Any 3D card will do if you're
only interested in real work - you don't need high performance, and
you don't need lots of games to support it. :)

Look for the cards that come with openGL drivers (yes, there are some
that give you the full openGL implementation) if that catches your
fancy.

afaik, 3Dfx is the only card with decent Linux support.

> [teldin~]$  emacs
> bash: emacs: command not found
$ emacs
bash: emacs: command not found

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