Best 2D AGP Solution for Knoppix?

[briansz]

It's soon time for me to upgrade my Knoppix-based daily driver machine, and I'm looking for an opinion from the forum members..

Right now I have a SuperMicro mobo with two PIII/500's, 768MB RAM, a 2940U2W card + 9GB U160 boot drive, and two Maxtor 7200RPM 40GB IDEs.

I plan to upgrade to a MSI dual-370 board with two PIII/866's (I already own the CPUs) overclocked to approximately 1GHz apiece. I'll use the same 768MB of stable PC133 RAM and U2W card/boot drive, though I will probably replace my old 40GB Maxtor drives with a Q-Logic Fibre Channel adapter and a 72GB 10K RPM Cheetah HD (I already own the HD also).

Right now I'm running an ancient 32MB TNT2 AGP card. I do mostly 2D graphic manipulation and it is starting to feel slow (much as my G3/400 Mac with a Formac 16MB card did before it).

Are there any good AGP video cards with accelerated 2D Xfree drivers that run under Knoppix without a lot of configuration headaches? I don't need super high rez or Quake framerates, just 1024x768 at 24/32 bit and ~ 100Hz refresh.

I found the nVidia 3D driver a bit unstable with Knoppix 3.2 and my TNT2, but my diffys might also have been caused by two suspect 256MB RAM sticks I've since removed from my box. I'm OK with running a binary-only driver to get accelerated 2D/3D if it is stable. X crashing out and me losing all my work from the last hour is not my definition of stable. Even worse, I didn't really notice a speed improvement for 2D with the accelerated nVidia drivers.

What would you buy if you were me? I'm fairly brand agnostic, I don't care who makes the card if it works reliably and provides a noticable 2D (most important) and 3D (less important) speed increase over my TNT2.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Brian
[email protected]

[stonent]

I'd try a cheap Radeon. Maybe a Matrox.

[briansz]

Radeon looks like the way to go at least based on the specs, even the G550 Matrox is not all that impressive with regard to the amount of memory it has and the card processor speed. I've got a G400 Dual Head AGP already that roughly compares to my TNT2. Parhelia is a bit out of my price range (eek).

I know a lot of people say to stay away from the newer Radeons with Linux because they can't even run them accelerated under X. Does anybody know what the threshold is for this 'feature' so I can look at the right family of older cards and not get a nasty surprise when it comes to drivers?

Sorry to be so clueless about this, but I'm not much of gamer and there aren't many Linux Video Card Shootouts over on Tom's Hardware <lol>.........

Brian

[Stephen]

Have you actually made sure the acceleration is turned on? You need to edit the XF86Config-4 and have this in the option section for the driver.

 Driver      "nvidia"
        Option      "NoLogo" "on"
        Option      "NvAgp"  "1"
        Option      "RenderAccel" "On"

And make sure the agpgart is not loaded so that it uses Nvidia's by having this near the bottom of the file in the /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

rmmod agpgart

[briansz]

Well, when my normally Very Stable System started becoming very unstable, I actually reverted back to my prior configuration. I went from Knoppix 3.3 back to 3.2, from 1GB RAM to 768MB, and from the accelerated Nvidia binary driver to the default XFree nv driver.

It was with 3.3 that I successfully (if you could call it that) ran the Nvidia 3D drivers. Got TuxRacer, etc. accelerated and working fine.

Most of the error messages I was seeing while the machine was unstable were RAM related (can't remember the exact string now, but that's how I was able to diagnose it with a Google search), so I pulled the two 256MB sticks I'd just added and replaced them with the known working 128's that were in there before. I'm running this machine at 112MHz bus (with 100MHz bus CPUs) and am used to uptimes of a month or more with heavy desktop use. Strangely, the unstable 256 MB's I pulled out were PC133 and the very stable 128 MB's are PC100).

Before I upgraded RAM and the OS, this machine was extremely stable. Now that I've gone back to my 'original' Knoppix and hardware configuration, it's extremely stable again.

The answer to your question is basically, "I can't be sure of my configuration at that time" since that install is gone and I have no way to check it now. I am going to go over this in my current install, however. By most accounts the default Xfree nv driver is supposed to have 2D accel turned on by default. My 2D gfx aren't horrible now, it's just that big images (greater than, say, 40MB) have VERY slow redraws. I'd just like things to be snappier in an overall sense as well, and going from a dual 500 to a dual 866 or dual 1GHz should help that out a bit also.

GF4 MX's are certainly cheap enough right now if I can establish that the accelerated driver wasn't the cause of my previous issues (~ $60 delivered on PriceWatch).

Regards,

Brian

[Stephen]

I have a GF4 MX it works great so I don't think you could go wrong at that price. Your on track with the ram being the problem you have to be very careful what brand of 133's you buy some are not up to snuff as they say. You might want to check out a 2.6 test kernel when I boot my testing drive it is real snappy an application loads in well under a second basically you click on the icon and it's there, I don't like to run it too much though until I can get the sensors running I got an Athlon here and it runs real hot so I got to keep an eye on it.

[briansz]

Think I will go the GF4 MX route after I reinstall the accelerated nv driver on this machine to test for stability. Didn't realize they were THAT cheap.

I'm pretty sure my problems before were caused by the RAM I mentioned, I even got the memory-related errors while compiling a couple different apps, and I don't think a gfx driver would cause that. It''s pretty hard to touch the GF4 MX performance for 60 bucks brand-new and delivered.

I can't believe I won't see a bit of an improvement in speed over the TNT2 <lol>.

Thanks for your advice, I'll be sure to check my Xfree config as you mentioned above.

Brian