[H-GEN] AGP video cards under X

[Robert Brockway]

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

Hi all.  i was just wondering what other people thought of agp video
cards under X.  I purchased an sis6326 agp card a little while back and
replaced my trusty old s3 Virge.

Here is my story:

I couldn't get it to work with any standard Xfree86 X server and a web
search revealed that Suse had put out a special Xserver for the sis cards.

After d/l this and a bit of mucking around with options I had a
working X server again.  The March release of the X server wasn't bad but
caused the box to lockup every 3-4 days.  The september release was quite
a bit slower and only caused a lockup every 10 days or so.

This, as you can imagine, was very annoying - it felt like I was using a
windows box, being concerned about heavy disk activity causing a lockup
when running this Xserver.

I have just changed back to my trusty old s3 Virge and the difference in
speed is amazing.  The agp card was performing like a slow isa card under
the September relase of the Xserver.

I have also heard about alot of other people having similar problems with
other agp based cards under X and was wondering what everyone thought?

I believe it must be a driver problem - ie agp is sifficiently different
from pci (despite agp being based on pci) that a new set of optimisations
might be needed to get agp cards working well.

I am interested to hear of counter-examples, ie people who are impressed
with their agp cards and prefer them to pci under X.
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au, robert at ralnet.net
                                robert.brockway at uq.net.au
			 WWW:   http://www.ralnet.net/~robert
"Do not sell IP routers to hostile governments."  Harley Hahn, 1993.

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