Which Video card I can choose

[subbiah]

Hello,

I want to have two monitors with two independent display content on Linux Machine.

The Resolution of 1st monitor is 1920x1200 - 24 bit depth

Second monitor is 1280x768 - 24 bit depth.

The Connection should be DVI and Card has to pluged in to AGP slot.

Can Any one suggest the Video card that I can have for my requirment?.

Will the P650 of Matrox will workout on Linux and XFree86?.

Can one had such a requirment can help me.

Thanks

- L. Subbiah

[Ribbit]

Someone move this to Alt. Lifestyles please?

Subbiah - do you need both screens to be DVI?

All - Is 1920x1200 even doable over DVI?

[Kruzin]

Moved to Alt. Lifestyles, home of all the *nix'ers...

[subbiah]

Yes. I am having Samsung 240T LCD monitor. That supports up to 1920x1200. and I need both the screens to be DVI.

But the restriction is that it should work with Redhat 7.2

[K6-III]

Try posting in the Matrox Tech Support forums.

They can tell you if a matrox card can do 1920x1200 via DVI. The Parhelia can do 1600x1200, but I'm not sure about 1920x1200.

[Ribbit]

Well your dual-DVI requirement limits your choice of cards anyway. Heres a list of what I know of, and how well they're supported under Linux (don't know how much this applies to Redhat 7.2 specifically). No idea if any can do 1920x1200 over DVI, you'll have to check that yourself.

Matrox Parhelia/P650/P750: Binary-only drivers, I'll let others here tell you how well they work.

ATi FireGL series: XFree86 comes with very complete support (except 3D acceleration). ATi also have separate binary-only drivers which support 3D as well.

Certain NVidia cards: XFree86 has support, and NVidia also have separate binary-only drivers. I've no idea how complete the support from either is (or even whether DVI is supported by either), except that you need the binary drivers for 3D.

3DLabs WildCatVP: The bottom-end VP560 and a couple of the top-end ones have dual-DVI. I'm not even sure that there is XFree86 support for these in any form, but Accelerated-X might support these cards.

Apparently Sapphire are going to make a dual-DVI Radeon 9800Pro and XT, which will basically be the same as the FireGLs above, but with a TV-out port as well. No idea if/how well the TV-out is supported in either drivers.

[K6-III]

Don't go with the Wildcat VP for linux.

[Ribbit]

No, I wouldn't go with the Wildcat either. It was really just there to pad out my list I'd recommend the Radeons or FireGLs, provided they can do those high resolutions over DVI.

[K6-III]

The reason I say not to for the WildcatVP is that it just plain doesn't have Linux drivers.

There are 3rd party drivers, but I doubt you want to pay an additional $100 for drivers that may or may not work...

[Slougi]

The ati drivers for linux suck ass, period. Especially the newer ones - the only ones that work acceptably for me and many other people I know are the 3.2.8 drivers. 2D acceleration is slow, i am not sure if for example Xft (xrender) is accelerated at all. 3D works well only with the old drivers - the new ones are extremely slow. Framebuffer must be disabled, or you run i nto mtrr errors. Running more than one X server completely locks up your machine after a few minutes - not just X, the kernel panics. Whenever you play an OGL game, the drivers leak memory. Xv support is dodgy, it seems to break randomly, restarting X fixes it.

Hate to say it, but Nvidia is the only company with acceptable Linux drivers. I totally regret buying an Ati card. For the record, I bought a radeon 9200 - was running a geforce 2 mx before.

[Ribbit]

I believe Xrender is only accelerated on the G400 (and G200/G100?).

Slougi, since you have an R200 series card, have you tried the DRI drivers?

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Ribbit
I believe Xrender is only accelerated on the G400 (and G200/G100?).

That is possible - in any any case the nvidia drivers were a lot faster in 2d, maybe ati does not even have XAA support?

Slougi, since you have an R200 series card, have you tried the DRI drivers?

Yes I have - the 2d part is much faster, they work with framebuffer, they do not leak memory, and they do not crash your computer with more than one X server. But the 3d support is incomplete - ie unreal tournament, enemy territory, america's army, winex etc. don't work correctly

[subbiah]

I may required to display Digital Camera image of size 1280x960 on one monitor and 815x615 size on second monitor. This images are coming to me at 30 frames per second. In Such a case, which card and Display method is suitable?.

will the OpenGL 2D will provide sufficient performance?
My PC CPU should not go high, as I need do to some image manipulation also. My PC is Intel Desktop motherboard.

Can I get direct access to the Video Memory, so that I can put my digital video data to card display memory area?

[Ribbit]

Hello again Subbiah, I was wondering where you'd gone

Originally posted by subbiah
I may required to display Digital Camera image of size 1280x960 on one monitor and 815x615 size on second monitor. This images are coming to me at 30 frames per second. In Such a case, which card and Display method is suitable?.

This is mainly a question of CPU->video card bandwidth. You're going to need a lot of bandwidth to be doing that, but I think any recent and decent AGP card should be able to handle this.

What form is the camera data in? Is it RGB or is it in a YUV-type format? If the latter, you might be able to use a hardware overlay to save some bandwidth (although since you're displaying two images you ideally want two overlays, and the only cards I know of with two overlays are the Parhelia and P-series. And I don't know if the Linux drivers support them.)

Can you give us any more detail about what you plan to be doing? Do you have a specific program or programs that you plan to be using?

will the OpenGL 2D will provide sufficient performance?
My PC CPU should not go high, as I need do to some image manipulation also. My PC is Intel Desktop motherboard.

OpenGL is rarely used for 2D graphics (and especially not for video) so I wouldn't worry too much about that for now. As for your CPU usage, it depends on a number of things - how fast your CPU is, what sort of image manipulation you're doing, and how the camera data is being transferred to the computer. Again, it would help if we knew more about what you're planning to do and how you're planning to do it.

Can I get direct access to the Video Memory, so that I can put my digital video data to card display memory area?

Not normally if you're running X. You can do this with the kernel framebuffer device, which X can run on top of, but I don't use it so I don't know much about it.

Incidentally, everyone else should do a web search and check out that Samsung 240T. Wow.

[Slougi]

Can I get direct access to the Video Memory, so that I can put my digital video data to card display memory area?
Not normally if you're running X. You can do this with the kernel framebuffer device, which X can run on top of, but I don't use it so I don't know much about it.

Isn't this possible with v4l? (video4linux)