[H-GEN] question

[Frank Brand]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and
Unix-related topics. ]

On Mon, 01 Nov 1999, Byron Ellacott wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and
> Unix-related topics. ]
> 
> On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Stephen Brine wrote:
> 
> > How is agp with Linux ? or Linux with agp
> > I am about to put it on a P2 machine with a 8 meg s3 AGP card and a PCI 
> > sound card.
> > that's right how would it go with PCI sound also
> 
> AGP is a marketing gimmick.  

I would not necessarily agree with this. I have run an S3 Trio PCI card and
replaced it on exactly the same board and setup with an S3 Trio 3D AGP and the
AGP was much faster. The video bus on AGP should be much faster than the PCI
bus. Although, test results I have seen on earlier AGP cards were pretty
ordinary but I think the later ones are much faster. I think the PCI bus runs
at bus speed but AGP can run at higher speeds 133 MHz is common and, presumably
the 4X AGP runs at 266 Mhz?

If the Linux kernel has support for the
> chipset in question, it'll work with AGP or PCI regardless.  The s3's
> typically do NOT work regardless of what type of card they are. ;)

I presume Stephen is talking about X Windows support. I have been using S3 PCI
cards for years and think they are great.  I am using a 16 Mb Riva TNT card at
present which performs really well. The S3 chip on the AGP card is listed as
supported (86c365, although there are a few variations on this) but I have not
tried one of these with X.

> 
> PCI sound is the same -- depends on the type of chipset.

Depends whether the chipset is supported in the sound software. I have run PCI
sound cards quite OK. Generally, sound is not an easy thing to handle in Linux.
It seems to be handled differently in different distros (eg some distros have
it disabled by default in the kernel) but most ppl I see reporting indicate that
if you fork out for the commercial OSS package there is tremendous support for
nearly everything.

--
Frank Brand
E-mail: fbrand at uq.net.au
Home Page: http://www.uq.net.au/~zzfbrand

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