Hallo,
I have an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP card. I plan to upgrade it mainly because the 2D performance in KDE (3.x without Beryl or Compiz) is just bad. Since we are talking about a relatively old desktop, I do not want to completely upgrade it. So, I want to just upgrade the VGA card.
I have found the following cards:
Nvidia GeForce 6200
Radeon HD 2400 Pro
Radeon X1600 Pro Avivo Edition
Now, the simple question: Their prices are just OK (just a couple of € separate them). Which chip is better? And which chip is better supported from our beloved distro?
The NVIDIA is supported. I still manage a couple of Sempron based PC’s with an NVIDIA 6000 series GPU onboard. KDE runs incl. desktop effects. 2D performance is excellent.
* Nvidia GeForce 6200
* Radeon HD 2400 Pro
* Radeon X1600 Pro Avivo Edition
These graphics card are old.
In my opinion amd ati radeon is the graphics card which will work without problems. Write your needs and your questions in hellas subforum and we will help you.
My understanding is the X1600 PRO is also considered legacy by ATI so it won’t allow you to use the proprietary ATI graphic driver (with the best performance). Thus if it were me I would not have that card on my list.
Reference your ATI Radeon 9200 AGP card, … my wife used to have a PC with an ATI Radeon 9200 PRO AGP card (which she gave away to the maid a couple of weeks ago). To obtain slightly better performance with this card, such as 3D (special desktop effects, the cube, … etc … ) I surfed a bit, and found some excellent links of note, such as xorg-driver-ati Info Page and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ , as areas to search for the solution.
Both Ubuntu (in their latest release) and Fedora (in their latest release) have applied a setting for this 3D to work on those two distros. I also eventually discovered that specifying ‘nomodest’ as a boot code, together with the following edit to the 50-device.conf file provides 3D (but not without some artifacts, such as the occasional full screen pink flash) :
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" "32"
EndSection
Hence I put ‘nomodeset’ in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in addition to those 50-device.conf edits. That entry is ESSENTIAL.
I also tried the entry " Option “AGPSize” “64” " but I found the value 32 more stable than 64.
I still do not know what Fedora and Ubuntu applied for this to work on those distros, but at least there is a ‘partial’ ( ?? ) solution for openSUSE. I say partial, as there are still some occasional minor artifacts with the 3D.
We no longer have this hardware in our household, so other than pass the above note there is nothing further that I can add/support wrt the Radeon 9200.
>
> The NVIDIA is supported. I still manage a couple of Sempron based PC’s
> with an NVIDIA 6000 series GPU onboard. KDE runs incl. desktop effects.
> 2D performance is excellent.
>
>
I like to second that, brought a old machine to life with an even older
nvidia card which gives full 3d acceleration support with the nvidia legacy
drivers.
The 6200 is supported still with the newest nvidia driver for linux.
