general video question

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 9:31 AM -0400 8/1/02, Michael Tucker wrote:
>Hi,
>
>   I'm not experienced with setting up X windows, and have recently heard
>some conflicting stories about where the "X Driver" lives. A x86 Linuxer
>told me that getting "accelerated drivers" for a video card meant
>replacing the XFree86 program with an accelerated version written by the
>video card's company. Does the PPC port simply provide an executable that
>has support for all the differnet cards? Is that why there's no talk of
>this on the list? Or, are we not getting the full power of the
>acceleration from whatever ATI or Nvidia card is in our boxes?

He's out of date.  That used to be the mechanism many many moons ago, 
but with XFree86 4.x the core X server is common to all hardware and 
acceleration support is supplied by modules.

YDL comes with what modules exist, more or less.  On PowerPC, ATI 
cards are unquestionably the ones to have.  If you want to do OpenGL 
3D accel, the Rage 128 is the best choice.  (Radeon is better 
hardware, but 3D isn't there yet on PPC, at least out of the box.) 
If you only need 2D, a Radeon may be better, though more recent 
versions (e.g. the 8500) may not work well or at all.

-- 
Tim Seufert