Monday, December 22

Geek

3.84 Million Pixels of Bliss

An hour and a half spent with a screwdriver, kernel modules, random config files and the latest nVidia drivers and I have finally have both Kei and Yuri working perfectly at 1600x1200 at 85Hz. Crisp, clear, rock solid.

The 3D performance on Yuri is still somewhat lacking... I have no idea what to make of this, since I have never tried to do any serious 3D graphics on Linux anyway. It's certainly not the card - a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 Ultra - so it's either a problem with the drivers or with the way I installed them. But 3D on Linux is not a priority right now; the only thing I'd use it for is pretty screen savers.

Kei, meanwhile, has a nifty new GeForce FX 5700. This makes no difference at all that I've seen so far, but over Christmas I expect to spend some time playing Knights of the Old Republic, so we'll see how that goes.

For now, I've also yanked the cable from the gigabit ethernet port. It's just not worth the bother for a 60% speedup (which is all Windows seems able to manage). I'll fix it another day.

At one point I managed to drop Kei on her head - I had propped the case up on a chair, but it turned out not to be very well balanced. No harm seems to have been done... And I can't type without touching wood here at Pixy Central.

Pixy's Tip of the Day

If you are assembling a new Linux box, don't buy a video card less than six months old. Unless it's for a server and you never plan to use the console in anything other than text mode.

Just don't. It's not worth the money or the time you will waste trying and failing to get it to work. Last year's cards, on the other hand, are cheap and plenty fast enough, and work just fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Jerry Pournelle said it best (probably quoting anon) back when EGA was bleeding edge: Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to set the old aside. The P2-700s I'm finding now in business dumpsters are just fine for my purposes.

Posted by: triticale at Monday, December 22 2003 10:41 AM (Ib4dG)

2 True enough. But when you start buying games and notice that your system barely scrapes by on the minimum configuration... That's a problem. At least, it is if you want to play those games. There are only a few reasons why I needed a faster computer: 1. Games. 2. Video editing. Or rather, encoding. Of course, I can't seem to get my codecs to do anything useful, but if I ever do, it will be fast. 3. Running crappy software. But even at 2.6GHz, a slug is still pretty much a slug. There used to be 4. Compiling large applications, but the previous generation of systems (anything over a gigahertz) pretty much dealt with theat.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 22 2003 11:16 AM (jtW2s)

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