What card to buy?

[neuron]

I currently have a 8800GTS, and http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=114858 + unreliable suspend is driving me nuts, I dont use 3d at all, and I haven't in a while, so I figure a 20-30$ ATI card might work well for me.

What I need is good 2d performance, compiz, suspend 2 ram and tvout. And I'd much prefer using the GPL'd driver.

Is there a cheap ATI card I can pickup and have work "out of the box"? I've looked around a bit, and it seems radeonhd doesn't have tvout? So I'm stuck with the older cards radeon supports, which arnt neccesarly that easy to find. Note that my system is fairly new, so agp is out of the picture.

I have an old 9200 PCI card I tried, but it seems to be too slow to push compiz at 1920x1200 resolution. Dragging a firefox window around pushes up X cpu usage considerably, and I can feel the lag.

[oibaf]

I have an old 9200 PCI card I tried, but it seems to be too slow to push compiz at 1920x1200 resolution. Dragging a firefox window around pushes up X cpu usage considerably, and I can feel the lag.

What linux distribution, driver and driver version are you using with the ATI 9200?

[neuron]

I'm using xorg 1.3 and driver 6.8.191 currently, I've also tried xorg 1.4 without change. Also gone through a lot of different combinations of AccelMethod/ColorTiling/EnablePageFlip/XAANoOffscreenPixmaps and MigrationHeuristic. This is on gentoo 64bit, kernel 2.6.25-r4, cflags -march=native -O2 -pipe so nothing especially interesting there

Goggling performance issues on this card I only found : http://osdir.com/ml/video.dri.user/2.../msg00069.html

[oblivious_maximus]

Probably an X1600/X1650 (r500) card is your best bet right now as far as you having a chance at finding a new one for sale somewhere and being able to use an open driver to get the features you want, today. IIRC, 3d and TVout support is still initial, but it's functional and will only get better as time passes.

edit: [s]just read that Xv support isn't quite there yet (it's in an X.org dev's tree but not the driver proper as yet). Like I said, initial support that will improve (though probably at a decent pace if development up to this point is any indication).[/s] edit2: I stand corrected. and I'm always sad when I try to use the strikeout tag and find it's not supported.

[bridgman]

FYI Xv for 5xx is fully supported in the -ati driver today, it's just the port of that code to -radeonhd which has not yet gone into master.

[neuron]

Very nice, I was looking at an outdated radeon manpage for my information on what was supported by that driver.

I can get a HD2400PRO(RV610) from a local shop, or post order either a RX1550/RX1650Pro/HD3450 for very little cash.

Am I likely to be able to plug those in and have tvout/xv/compiz/suspend2ram/2d right away? Everything worked perfectly on the 9200PCI card I had laying around, just way too slowly to be usable with compiz. Also are there any differences between the models I listed I should be aware of? The most resource intensive the card would be required to do is some fancy compiz effects.

[bridgman]

The 1650 Pro will probably give you the best combination of performance and immediate open source driver support today. It should have a 128-bit memory bus (vs 64-bit for the HD2400 and 3450) and a bit more shader power than the others.

[Redeeman]

So... does DRI/DRM 3d really work with these cards?

Whats important to me is:

1: it MUST have dual-link dvi or displayport (i need 2560x1600)
1.1: is stable is stable is stable, and NOT only between ferengi
2: it MUST not fuck up weirdly like nvidia, and display completely unreadable garbled output untill a driver for X is started.
3: 2d must work, aka not as slow as nvidia 8xxx taking 5-10 seconds to redraw a firefox.
4: 3d - speed isnt so important, as support.

as speedwise, i can say that intels GMA X3100 is enough, so i dont really need much..

does AMD/ATi have any offerings available which can do this?

[bridgman]

So... does DRI/DRM 3d really work with these cards?

Whats important to me is:

1: it MUST have dual-link dvi or displayport (i need 2560x1600)
1.1: is stable is stable is stable, and NOT only between ferengi
2: it MUST not fuck up weirdly like nvidia, and display completely unreadable garbled output untill a driver for X is started.
3: 2d must work, aka not as slow as nvidia 8xxx taking 5-10 seconds to redraw a firefox.
4: 3d - speed isnt so important, as support.

as speedwise, i can say that intels GMA X3100 is enough, so i dont really need much..

does AMD/ATi have any offerings available which can do this?

With a 5xx GPU the ddx/mesa/drm stack works surprisingly well. I was playing with an R580 last week and it was quite solid other than the usual compiz vs 3d flickering.

I know the 5xx parts support at least one dual-link DVI, haven't checked to see if they all support simultaneous dual-link on both DVI connectors.

Did you really mean ferengi ? The funny-looking little guys from DS9 ?

I haven't heard about the garbled output between boot and driver startup so can't say for sure... other than not having heard about it

2D speed seems to be getting pretty good these days with a modern X server and EXA acceleration. The 5xx family has the traditional 2D engine which may still help with 2D performance in the short term, although most 2D acceleration uses the 3D engine these days anyways.

[oblivious_maximus]

I do believe one of the "Rules Of Aquisition" is "a deal is a deal is a deal... but only between Ferengi"

LOLs