> I have a ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 PCI 16 MB that works well, so I have
> put
> the Radeon card back in the box for now.
>
> I currently use XATITV from the GATOS project. It runs smoothly and can do
> still captures. The tuner works and so does the svideo. I tried XaweTV
> but it
> would not capture and the svideo would only display in black and white.
>
> I am subscribed to XFree86 and V4L lists for the past 6 monthes and I
> have sent many messages with out a single response.
>
> I would not bother buying a video card whose manufaturer {ATI} will not
> help
> the open source community to develop drivers for their products. NVidia
> writes
> there own drivers and provides them as binaries. There are other
> manufatures
> that take an active part in the development of the drivers for their
> products.
>
ATI has released drivers that work (fireGL 8800 drivers work as long as
you are not using AMD Northbridge). The information for writing the
drivers is available to qualified developers and tungsten graphics has
been working on the drivers but they still haven't finished the 7500
drivers fully. The 8500 drivers will be based on the 7500 frame work.
Recently, Tungsten announced that the Weather Channel had provided
funding for the development of Radeon 8500 Drivers. They plan to release
drivers in Q4.
Also Xgi's Summit Workstation (an accelerated x) has full 8500 support.
Though I doubt that they have support for ATI Theater Chip.
> I have written to ATI on a nuber of occasions, but are not interested in
> taking
> an active role in helping with the drivers for there products. They have
> stepped back and now will allow certain people access to details about
> their
> cards and chipsets, but thats about the extent of it. Currently there is NO
> V4L support for ATI cards. There is only XVideo support for non "Theatre"
> chip sets.
Depends on the card. ATI TV Wonder cards are supported (at least the non
usb models).
>
> There appears to only be good support for bttv chipsets for video capture.
>
> The Matrox G400 and a couple of nVidia cards have good 3D and 2D
> accelerated
> support, but most other video cards pretty much only have marginal
> accelerated
> support if any.
Matrox G series has crap for 3D support. 2D is the best but they really
haven't worked 3D for G series for years. That said they have decided
that they want back in on the 3D card market and are coming out with an
impressive set of features in their new card.
Nvidia's Cards have excellent support but they tend to release drivers
with memory leaks. They seem to work fine for games but as soon as you
start doing high end open gl, you'll have problems. It's great that they
release linux drivers but what if I am running on an Alpha or PPC,or I
want to run a BSD? I am stuck with the crappy nv driver. I would be
better if they worked with the community and released the source.
The Radeon 7500 driver isn't bad but the current driver lacks TCL (Alpha
version of the TCL driver is available). The problem with the 7500 is
that it is still pretty weak compared to the 8500 or the GeForce 3 or 4
cards.
