[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphical card for mplayer

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 08:54:29AM +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> D Richard Felker III <dalias at aerifal.cx> writes:
> 
> > G450 and higher are just crippled versions of the G400, so there's no
> > reason to buy them except to waste money!
> 
> except that you don't get g400s anymore.

Try ebay or sites that carry old stuff. You'll get a better price too.

> > ATI works great with the GATOS (free!!) drivers.
> 
> except for TV out, which is extremely cumbersome to setup on the cards
> i have (reboot with tv plugged in etc. I dont want to reboot to activate
> TVout), ok, this is no sample of current ATI cards, Mach64 DVD+ and
> Rage Mobility 2 P/M. 

Should be possible to make a dongle that will trick the card that it's
plugged into a TV, for less than $5...

> > Some nvidia cards now work fine with the free drivers too. The crappy
> > binary drivers are only needed for certain (mostly older) cards or for
> > opengl.
> 
> Well, there are people who pay for a 3d engine and want to use it ;-)
> For me and my kids, the matrox is enough, but there are people, who use
> opengl - and not only for playing games. One of them told me, that the
> nvidia driver has the most featureful 3d driver. I cant judge this. And
> the drivers seem to be constantly evolving, maybe they are no longer as
> crappy as we may remember them (2 years ago was the last time i had to
> use a nvidia card at work).

If they're playing games they should probably have a wintendo... I
don't see any point in putting a fancy 3d accelorator into a unix
system unless you're doing 3d modelling or something.

> >> I always was an anti-Nvidia-binary-driver advocate, but since there seems
> >> to be NO hardware with open specs and open drivers, i probably would use
> >> the one which is best and continuously supported.
> > 
> > This is G400, which *does* have free drivers. ATI would also be a good
> > choice, as long as you get a card supported by GATOS.
> 
> but why buy ATI, who don't give out useable drivers and specs and not buy
> nvidia who at least provide a driver?. btw, afaict GATOS doesnt provide
> more funcitonality than the opensource nv driver. Or does it provide
> 3d acceleration (can't check now, since i'm offline)? 

I dunno, but I think it does 3d. I'm quite happy with g400 and have no
intention of buying an ATI card.

Providing a driver is NOT a beneficial act on nvidia's part. Rather,
it reduces the demand for a free driver (because lots of fools will be
happy with the buggy x86-only proprietary one), discouraging people
from spending their time reverse engineering the hardware and writing
a driver because there's already one that's "good enough".

> maybe i'm a bit "devils advocate" here, but the world isnt always black
> and white.

More often than not, it is. Proprietary = evil. Free = good.

Rich