Re: [TCLUG:6844] Is video card using AGP slot recommended.

[Michael Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

> My hardware vendor is recommending to me a video card that would use the
> AGP slot.
> 
> Which video cards for the AGP slot are supported by Redhat 6.0?

A large number of cards that (should) work are listed at
http://www.xfree86.org/cardlist.html

I should point out, though, that the important thing to look at is usually the
chipset.  The problem with that is many manufacturers don't like to tell you
their chipset anymore..  Occasionally, two cards based on the same chipset will
behave very differently (For instance, some people have had trouble with
Permedia2-based cards made by Creative Labs, while other Permedia2 cards work
fine..), but that's pretty rare.  Also, some cards appear to be the same, but
use different chipsets (3Com did something similar with their 3C905 Ethernet
cards.  The 3C905 was based on a 'Vortex' chip, and  the  3C905B was based on  a
'Boomerang' chip..  That caused a fair amount of trouble..)

Anyway, a bunch of the chipsets are listed at 
http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.3.1/README3.html

Some cards are supported somewhat indirectly (like the Nvidia TNT chips -- go to
www.nvidia.com for that..)

> Are very good cards being made for the AGP slot and if so which ones?

Yes.  There are a lot of them.  I don't have a clear recommendation, though..

The AGP slot is designed to allow the video card much higher-speed acces to the
system and it's memory, with very little competition from the rest of the
system.  AGP is descended from PCI (although I don't know the complete details
-- I don't work for Intel ;-)  PCI is already fairly fast.  A 33MHz PCI bus has
a bandwidth of 133MB/s (4bytes wide multiplied by the speed) -- of course,
that's shared among quite a few devices (IDE controller, USB controller, PCI
cards, ISA cards, etc).  

The AGP slot basically tacks on another PCI bus to the whole system, but it only
has one device on it -- the video card.  That allows the card to dedicate the
entire 133MB/s to itself (in theory), which makes it a lot faster.  AGP also
allows the video card to access the system memory directly.  From what I
understand, an AGP video card could be shipped without any RAM on it and still
work as well as any other video card (although I imagine that would cause some
serious performance problems..)  That feature will probably be used most
extensively for storing textures for 3D cards..

Hope I didn't bore anyone too much there ;-)

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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088 | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]