Linux Video Card Comparison - October 2000

Conclusions

Again, we see the NVIDIA cards dominating in both 2D and 3D performance under Linux. NVIDIA has worked hard on their drivers and they are proud of their results, as they should be. Their performance edge makes it difficult to justify another card on the basis of open-source drivers alone. Many users still feel burned by their schizophrenic attitude towards TNT drivers under Linux, which keeps them away from NVIDIA's latest offerings. For those interested, after announcing open source drivers, they obfuscated the code before releasing. Then the drivers sat, unmodified, unimproved and unsupported. Finally, they released their revolutionary new driver architecture (as used here with the GeForce2 cards), which supports the TNT/TNT2 as well as their GeForce and GeForce2 cards.

Still, there are other features on the other cards that may interest other users. Matrox supports both TV and flat panel out on their G400/G450 cards as well as dual head output in their drivers. It should be noted that even this support (Dualhead and TV/DVI output) is closed-source, as opening it would violate an NDA between Matrox and Macrovision.

Further, the ATI All-In-Wonder cards with TV input are also supported under Linux, though unofficially, by the GATOS project.

Finally, Linux Games has just released a very in-depth review of several video cards and their corresponding gaming performance under Linux and Windows. They cover gaming performance for specific games and discuss differences in driver support between Windows and Linux.

Related Links

· Matrox - Manufacturers of the Millennium G400Max and G450
· NVIDIA - Manufacturers of the GeForce2 MX
· Red Hat - Linux distribution used in these tests
· XFree86 - The X11R6.4 implementation used for these tests
· DRI - The direct rendering implementation used by XFree86
· Linux3D - Web site with general Linux 3D information
· GLX - The X extension that allows for OpenGL acceleration even remotely
· Precision Insight - Initial designers of DRI, site includes a lot of DRI information
· GATOS - The GATOS project, support for TV input on ATI cards
· Render - The X extension in development allowing for anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending between windows
· SPEC - Creators of SPECviewperf, which was supposed to be used for 3D benchmarking in this article
· Enlightenment - Window manager and home of Evas, used for 3D benchmarking in this article