[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphical card for mplayer

[Stefan Seyfried]

Sergei Klink <sklink at yandex.ru> writes:
 
> Good news-I just did and found out that it DOES work! Yay, in other words :).
> That's ATI's proprietary :( X 4.3.0 drivers from schneider-digital.de
> I'll fiddle with it on the weekend and can share the experience later if
> anyone wants :) I'll probably have some mplayer-related questions at that
> time, too.

ok, so this leaves us with usable but proprietary drivers for
  - ATI
  - NVIDIA
  - Matrox
(when i last checked the matrox website, G550 and higher were only usable
with the _binary only_ HAL module, or/and you could not use half of the
features.)

I always was an anti-Nvidia-binary-driver advocate, but since there seems
to be NO hardware with open specs and open drivers, i probably would use
the one which is best and continuously supported.
AFAICT, matrox and ATI are a bit jumpy, sometimes (mostly a looooong time
ago) they gave out specs, now they give out no specs and buggy drivers,
that lack a lot of features and are not-so-good in quality.
Nvidia never gave specs, but has a continuously developed driver, which
is seemingly getting better and (as i am told, i cant verify this but a
former coworker did openGL programming for fun and i trust his opinion on
this) very complete. So, which of the different evils i'm going to choose?
I don't know, i have two old G400, one G200, two pci MGAs (millenium and
mystique) and one PCI Mach64, i dont own any nvidia (i wrote, i always
was an anti-nvidia advocate :-), but if i had to buy one, i'm not sure i
wouldn't go for the relatively cheap but powerful geforces.

I think, a lot of opinions on the subject of graphics cards and drivers
are already more based on myth than on facts. For example, i have one of
those infamous NeoMagic chips (a NM2200) in my Thinkpad and it is working
quite well which means i can watch mpeg4/divx with DVD resolution on a
PII 366 without maxing out the cpu. I am sure, there are neomagic chips
which are bad as hell, but not all are.

regards,
-- 
 Stefan Seyfried, seife at gmane0305.slipkontur.de
+----------------------------------------------+

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