[MPlayer-users] "What card do you suggest me to buy?"

[Corey Hickey]

Funny how all of us are going to go out an buy a video card soon. I was 
tentatively planning on getting something like a GeForce3 any time 
before Neverwinter Nights is released. :)
Regarding how well nVidia cards work with MPlayer, I've gotten the 
impression that the only driver problems are with older, pre-GeForce2 
models. Has anyone had problems with the newer cards? Of course, the 
closed source drivers are a definite minus, but if they work well I can 
live with that.

> So, it looks like voodoo5 would be not too bad to have - that's
> probably the only one I haven't really heard complaints of(doesn't
> mean anything, I know). Matrox ones with TVout are probably too slow.
> Oh, I think this is terrible - it is so difficult to find the right
> video card compared to, say, sound card...
> 

I've have a Voodoo5 5500 in my system for a couple years. I was pretty 
happy with it back when I ran Windows, but once I switched to Linux, I 
found that the driver support just wasn't up to par. As I understand it, 
the Voodoo5 5500 essentially has the chipsets of two Voodoo4s, running 
together in parallel. Unfortunately, the Linux 'tdfx' driver only 
supports one of those chipsets, hence half the performance. Not only 
that, but I never did manage to get hardware accelerated OpenGL to work 
for me. The problem, it seemed, was that bus mastering could not be 
enabled for the card. I followed the instructions in 
http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/DRI9.html#20 but bus mastering still 
wouldn't enable.

As far as 2-D performance, the Voodoo5 works fine with xv for me, but 
I'm looking forward to replacing it.

A while ago I found a fan-less GeForce2 MX-400 in the "free pile". When 
I attached an old fan to the heat sink and put the card in my system, it 
did work but the video output was screwed up. The display was usable, 
but had lots of little horizontal lines on it. Something must've gotten 
baked when the original fan went out.... For curiosity's sake, I 
installed the drivers, and hardware OpenGL worked like a dream.

-Corey