I’ve decided to buy myself out of video card trouble.
Is there a list of low-cost recommended PCI/PCI express graphic cards ?
Background:
I have an MSI K9AG Neo-2 Digital motherboard with an onboard Radeon X1250, but the drivers are moved to legacy. So it’s running on standard Vesa drivers, I think, and movie playback in full screen is choppy, I can’t use desktop effects and software that requires openGL doesn’t work.
I followed some instructions in an attempt to fix this, but then X wouldn’t start at all. I fixed that, but some programs still refuse to start, and tell me that:
libatiuki.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I have yet to regret using any low-cost (cheap) nvidia card. Onboard or discrete, they always work, good 3D, acceptable gaming, good HD video playback, full desktop effects - as opposed to an ATI onboard I have that won’t support the color inversion effect, for example.
Not buying the the latest of the last generation might help too.
Low cost … hmmm … I assume then you don’t plan to play games. How about HD video ? Do you plan to play back HD video ?
This is not a new motherboard, and I note it has only PCI-Ex1 and PCI. I don’t see AGP mentioned. PCI has limited bandwidth, so IMHO you should look for a PCI-Ex1 graphic card. But PCI-Ex1 has a limited slot size, so you need to be careful when you purchase a Graphic card that it will physically fit/connect.
My wife has a nVidia G210 graphic card (w/512 MB RAM) which has excellent Linux support, albeit it is NOT a gaming card, and without a fast processor (and fortunately she has a fast processor) it won’t handle the very highest HD videos (1920x1080 @ 25 MB/sec) but it will handle lower resolution/bit rate HD videos. I suspect a G210 with 1GB RAM might handle 1920x1080 @ 25MB/sec HD video.
Vesa, you think ? Hmmm … Can you confirm ? If running openSUSE-11.3 KDE, just look at the ‘my computer’. Or if Gnome/LXDE, then just look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log file to find out what driver is in use.
Does the radeon or radeonhd drivers not support the X1250 ?
So I have also had very good luck using nVidia. I have used “cheep” ones such as 8500 or 9500 with good success. I really liked the old 8800GT and the 9800GTX which if you found one used would be good enough. I did try a GT240 and it did not work well with my main TV and I boxed it up. Right now I have a GT275 and a GTX460 and they are working well for me, but not econo boards. I think I would stick with something around $100 I think and I would not be afraid to look for some of the older cards if they are still new.
Thank you all for great advice. I’ll certainly have a look at nVidia.
I see I get som radeonHD errors in the Xorg.0.log, so it doesn’t seem to support it. Can’t remember where I got the idea that it was running standard vesa-mode. I might have misunderstood som log somewhere. The xorg.log says Radeon later, so I guess it does run the Radeon-drivers. You can see the content of my xorg.0.log file here.
Based on that log file, it looks to me that X tries to load the radeonhd driver and fails (and then later on unloads the failed driver):
# 18.462] (II) [DRM] Kernel mode setting enabled
# 18.462] (EE) FATAL: RadeonHD presently does not work with kernel modesetting (KMS).
#Please disable KMS in your kernel.
# 18.462] (II) [KMS] Kernel modesetting enabled.
......
# 18.870] (II) UnloadModule: "radeonhd"
it also unloads any FBDEV and VESA graphic driver instances:
# 18.870] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdev"
# 18.870] (II) Unloading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/fbdev_drv.so
# 18.871] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdevhw"
# 18.871] (II) Unloading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/linux/libfbdevhw.so
# 18.871] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa"
# 18.871] (II) Unloading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so
and it loads the ‘radeon’ driver, where your resolution appears to be 1650x1050
# 18.718] (II) RADEON(1): Modeline "1680x1050"x0.0 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync (65.3 kHz)
# 18.865] (II) RADEON(1): Using exact sizes for initial modes
# 18.865] (II) RADEON(1): Output VGA-0 using initial mode 1680x1050
I note the log file recommends you to “Please disable KMS in your kernel” … Did you do so ?
My speculation thou, is you are correct. Special desktop effects will not work with this card on openSUSE-11.3, at least not without special edits to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file (which I had to do with my wife’s old PC that had an AGP ATI RV280 (Radeon-9200Pro) graphics card). And even with the edits to that file, the special desktop effects did not run well with openSUSE (I note both Ubuntu and Fedora have better implementations of the open source radeon driver than openSUSE, possibly because they have applied patches that have not yet made their way upstream, and then back downstream to openSUSE).
I do not know anything about a ‘missing libatiuki.so.1’ file, but it does read to be a bit bizarre. Did you surf google looking for information on that error ?
For my wife’s old PC (with a ATI 9200 PRO (RV280) AGP graphic card) what gave her PC special desktop effects, was my edit her /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file, so that it read:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "radeon"
## Required magic for radeon/radeonhd drivers; output name
## (here: "DVI-0") can be figured out via 'xrandr -q'
#Option "monitor-DVI-0" "Default Monitor"
#oldcpu added following 2 lines
Option "BusType" "PCI"
Option "AGPSize" "64"
EndSection
However that may be specific to her graphic card. And in fact it was not perfect, for while it did give special desktop effects, never the less I also did get artifacts after some time, when using that 50-device.conf file setting.
The difficulty in editing the 50-device.conf file, is it requires a level of knowledge that few of us have (I know my knowledge is weak here).
I’m NOT a Ubuntu fan. I am a Fedora fan. Still, in my case (possibly similar to your views) the absence of special desktop effects would not be enough to convince me to leave openSUSE.*
The xorg.log says Radeon later, so I guess it does run the Radeon-drivers. You can see the