Which video card should I buy?
Dear Lazyweb: I’ve got a desktop machine, which I use sometimes at home. It’s plugged into a flatscreen monitor. The machine has an old Trident CyberBlade video card in it, which won’t drive the flatscreen at anything higher than 1024×768, which is pretty annoying. So, I’d like to buy a new video card for it. However, I’m horribly confused by video card stuff. Which card should I buy? It needs to be supported by free software drivers (i.e., not require the nvidia or fglrx binary drivers), but it does not need to do anything very exciting; I don’t play games on the machine, for example. It’d be nice to have the 3D compiz stuff, too. As far as I know, Intel don’t sell separate cards, which leaves me with ATI or nVidia; I keep hearing that “older” ATI Radeon cards are well supported by free software drivers, but I don’t know whether that includes enough 3D support for compiz, and I don’t know precisely what “older” means: ATI’s product range confuses the hell out of me. I’ve got no problem buying something from eBay, so it doesn’t have to be a card that is currently on sale in shops. Any advice gratefully accepted.
Anything ATI/AMD up til X950 will work. and a good few generations older will work with compiz.
(The X1xxx series will supposedly get a free driver within these few days… but 3d is still a little way off, so no compiz.)
18 minutes later
Big news on the ATI front:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826&num=1
It should mean that very soon all ATI cards are supported by free drivers for 2D and 3D.
18 minutes later
If you want it to work today, with free drivers, under compiz, buy an ATI X850 PE on ebay. That’s the greatest card that’s supported natively and works well.
21 minutes later
ATI’s Radeon 9250 with 128MB of memory is inexpensive (
24 minutes later
Henry G: I know about the new ATI stuff (and wrote about it a couple of days ago), but it’s not out yet, and I don’t need an ultra-powerful card.
mkv, Xav: those are useful recommendations, thanks!
26 minutes later
I suppose it all depends on what your mobo is and if its not worth upgrading your chip/(intel)mobo/mem in one go, the words trident cyberblade remind me of days of yore when graphics cards were all PCI
89 minutes later
As you said you don’t want to play games on it, you don’t actually *need* an X850. I dunno how much they run on eBay, but I’d refine the suggestion to ‘the cheapest ATI card you can buy that’s an X850 or older’.
You will also need to consider the interface it uses. I expect it uses AGP for graphics. If you’re really unlucky, it uses PCI. AGP cards are still reasonably easily available but it is getting significantly *harder* to find an AGP card than a PCI-E card, and if you just walk into a computer store and buy a graphics card these days, it’ll likely be PCI-E. So make sure to get an AGP one.
If the machine uses regular PCI for graphics, you’re going to have a lot of fun, because PCI graphics cards are now basically extinct. Real computer stores will likely have some old dusty ones in a closet they’ll sell you.
Either way, remember to crack the lid and check the interface before you buy a card.
You may also want to consider making sure you get a card with passive cooling (i.e. just a heatsink, no fan) for two practical reasons: it’s quieter, and it’s one fewer moving part that will inevitably break (graphics card fans tend to be good for around two to three years, heatsinks work forever. Or until the heat death of the universe, at least.)
3 hours later
I second the Radeon 9250. These are cheap (around EUR 20 or 30 where I live *new*, can still be bought new, work fine in compiz, and most important to me, are avaliable with a passive cooler.
And there is a free driver that works well,
while the newer ones will eventually get one, if the newly released specs are implemented.
I am very happy with mine, it does everything I want (basically compiz and desktop effects like shadows) and it was cheap.
4 hours later
Sounds like the 9250 will be cheaper and run compiz, but just for the record I’m running with a Radeon 9600 under the open driver and everything in compiz works for me and works well so far except for the blur plugin, which crashes X completely. For all I know it could just be a software issue though, especially since I’m using Trevino’s repository.
6 hours later
Karl: there’s no budget for a whole new motherboard, sadly, added to which is the fact that if I bought a new motherboard and had to wire it up myself then I’d probably short it out.
All: thanks for the recommendations: this is really useful!
7 hours later
So you are looking to buy a new video card… This wouldn’t have anything to do with Jackfield’s continued development, would it? Is this a hint that Jackfield will be getting some extra attention soon or should I settle down a bit? I remember you posting earlier that you didn’t have the video card, so you could not test some things…
14 hours later
BrokenCrystal: no, it doesn’t. Jackfield development happens on my laptop computer.
17 hours later
Check out http://free3d.org/ for a performance comparison of cards running with free (libre) drivers. ATI will be the way to go. It’s just a matter of figuring out which model you want and can locate/afford.
26 hours later
Jonathon: stunner. What a hero you are.
30 hours later
A year ago, I had a similar problem, and went with an ATI 9250 (actually rebranded by Sapphire). At the time, I think, the 9250 was the fastest ATI card supported by free drivers.
The DRI wiki has more info on specific compatibility, e.g.:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATI
35 hours later
I would like to help with development, unfortunately I only have experience programming in a Windows environment. I have two notebooks running Vista/Ubuntu dual boot, a desktop running Ubuntu/XP dual boot, and at work all we have is XP Pro and menu driven IBM AIX Unix. I have been playing around with Mono and Mono Develop, but that probably wouldn’t help you out a whole lot with Jackfield… That said, let me know if I can assist in any way.
4 days later
I recently purchased an ATi PCI vga card. I want to install it on an HP Compaq machine - D220 model. By the way the current vga is on board but is shaky and the images get distorted sometimes. When I slot in the new card the monitor does not come on on either cards. And unfortunately I could not find anywhere in the bios where to disable the embedded vga. Some technician in the shop I bought the card says the PCI card cannot work because the PC has AGP provision. So I must buy another card but an AGP this time. What do you think? PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!
3 weeks later
whatever
3 weeks later