Video Cards

[Joseph Sinclair]

Just so someone here answers the original question:

1) The Radeon X600SE has good 2D support and limited 3D support in the GPL driver
2) The ATI proprietary drivers do not yet support the GLX extension (and hence don't support AIGLX).

Short test:
1) install Ubuntu 6.10, and apt-get install driconf xdriinfo
2) run driconf to see if it detects DRI support in your card, if it does then you might get Beryl working (but it won't be particularly stable, practice any demo before showing it to the bosses).

If you MUST have the eye-candy on that machine and the above test is negative, you can install the fglrx driver and layer XGL above X and get Compiz on that.  It's a little more work, and not as fast, but it might work if the GPL driver doesn't.

==Joseph++

Nathan England wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm looking for a machine with a new video card. I haven't had much luck with 
> a few of the older Radeon based cards, and I love the nVidia cards, however, 
> the machine I am purchasing only has an ATI Radeon X600SE.
> 
> I'm not going to play games, and this is a Linux only box, however, I would 
> like to play with AIGLX and all the new fancy eye candy.
> 
> How do you like the performance of the newish ATI cards and how well do they 
> work? The ones I've used recently just seemed really flaky, especially 
> compared to the nVidia cards and my personal favorite the Intel i915 based 
> cards.
> 
> Any information you can offer will be greatly appreciated. I'm not going to 
> impress anyone with the gaming ability of this machine, but the eye candy 
> will convince upper management that Linux will be better suited in the future 
> than XP... lol 
> It's funny how the eye candy wins things out like this...
> 
> nathan