[BLUG] AGP compat

[Galvanick Lucipher]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, great shamer wrote:

: I am looking into getting a Voodoo3 3000 or Voodoo4 4500 agp card.  I 
: scanned a couple of hcl's and saw that the Voodoo3 was supported but didn't 
: see anything about the Voodoo4.  Does anyone know if it is supported (or 
: will be soon) or of a workaround?

I use a Voodoo3 2000 AGP with no troubles. But as you pointed out the
Voodoo4 (and Voodoo5) use a newer chipset. redhat.com says that RH 7 will
support the Voodoo5 (using XFree86 4.0) but doesn't mention the
Voodoo4. However since the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 are the same chipset I
would imagine it will work. Let's see what Google says...

"Voodoo4 Redhat" comes back with lots of hits and they're all
positive. It appears anything that supports the Voodoo5 will support the
Voodoo4.

My comment: according to the benchmarks I've seen it's generally
considered that the GeForce2 cards have surpassed the Voodoos in
performance, especially at higher resolutions. According to Pricewatch you
can get a GeForce2 MX for about $90, which seems competitive with the
Voodoo4 4500. Add to that the fact that Nvidia recently bought out 3dfx
the company, and I'd feel better about buying a GeForce.

There are benchmarks of GeForce2 MX vs. Voodoo4 4500 here:

http://www.chickshardware.com/html/reviews/v44500/3.html

I've also seen similar benchmarks of the GeForce2 Ultra vs. the Voodoo5
series, with similar results. GeForce2 is just better technology.

Now the bad news: the GeForce2 series is not supported "out of the box" by
XFree 4.0. An "nv" driver has recently been added to XFree CVS, or you can
download some (different) drivers from Nvidia here:

http://www.nvidia.com/Products/Drivers.nsf/Linux.html

So... not to say that the Voodoo4 is a bad card, it certainly may be good
enough for you depending on your expectations. I'm still very happy with
the Voodoo3 I bought 2 years ago. But the GeForce series seems to have
more future and I wanted to point out some options.

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