supported graphics cards

[Kristian Rink]

Richard;


Am Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:40:38 +0100
schrieb Richard Kimber <rkimber at ntlworld.com>:

> > http://wiki.x.org/wiki/VideoDrivers

> Thanks, but it doesn't seem to list the supported cards.  

perhaps you might want to have a look at SuSE's Hardware Database as
well, to be found here:

http://cdb.suse.de/

Earlier in my life, I thought about making up something like that for
Debian (derivatives), but somehow I doubt it is worth the effort, for
various reasons.



> assume that if there's a driver for, say, nvidia-based cards, then it
> will work (non-3D acceleration) for all such cards?  And without
> (known) issues in 64 bit?


Answering out of my experience: Probably not. Again, several reasons:
On one side, probably finding out what sort of chipset your board is
actually equipped with might be difficult not to say impossible. Look
at what is inside my machine:

[snip]
...
0000:02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon
RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]
...
[snip]

This is one of the "earliest" and Radeon boards I can think of, a board
I bought several years ago and so. Looking at the Xorg.log of my
running X server, I can see something like that:

[...]
(II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets: ATI Radeon QD (AGP),
        ATI Radeon QE (AGP), ATI Radeon QF (AGP), ATI Radeon QG (AGP),
        ATI Radeon VE/7000 QY (AGP/PCI), ATI Radeon VE/7000 QZ
	(AGP/PCI), ATI ES1000 515E (PCI), ATI ES1000 5969 (PCI),
        ATI Radeon Mobility M7 LW (AGP),
        ATI Mobility FireGL 7800 M7 LX (AGP),
[...]

By today, most if not all of these cards are supported by X so it's
fine, after all. When I bought mine, I had a hard time getting it to
work until I found out that, those days, there was support for the
Radeon QD board but not for my QY/7000 VE....


Other way 'round: To make sure your hardware is supported by X, there
are a few approaches:


- Buy older stuff. This way, in most cases, chances are good to have a
working X display afterwards, and to even have reliable drivers
(actually, I learnt how to use cdrecord on the console because
initially there was Radeon support but it was far from being _stable_).


- Have a look at the manual pages of the X driver modules. They are
quite verbose about what chipsets are supported (Example: nv(4)


[...]
SUPPORTED HARDWARE
       The nv driver supports PCI and AGP video cards based on  the
following NVIDIA chips:

       RIVA 128              NV3
       RIVA TNT              NV4
       RIVA TNT2             NV5
       GeForce 256, QUADRO   NV10
       GeForce2, QUADRO2     NV11 & NV15
       GeForce3, QUADRO DCC  NV20
       nForce, nForce2       NV1A, NV1F
       GeForce4, QUADRO4     NV17, NV18, NV25, NV28
       GeForce FX, QUADRO FX NV30, NV31, NV34, NV35, NV36, NV37, NV38
       GeForce 6XXX          NV40, NV41, NV43, NV44, NV45, C51
       GeForce 7XXX          G70, G71, G72, G73
[...] )

This can be of help, but it requires you to figure out _exactly_ which
chip and revision comes with your board. 


- If you already own the device, or if you know what it will be,
consult the SuSE hardware database or ask this mailing list whether
someone around here knows about the very device. Include as much
information as you can get. At best, include dumps of "lspci" and 
"lspci -n" to make your board identifiable...


Good luck to you, sorry I can't help you in a better way...
Cheers,
Kris





-- 
Kristian Rink *  http://zimmer428.net * jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de
icq: 48874445 *  fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)