some fresh graphics for my workstation
It’s that time again, time to update the graphics performance of one of my machines, my workstation in this case. I just saw it’s almost two years ago I last bought a graphicscard (not counting a a very cheap and obsolete ATI Fire GL).
old and new, MSI ti4200 and XFX 6800GS
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Since I’m not much of a gamer, true gaming performance alone is not the first thing I look for. In deciding on a card, future upgrades for my monitors have been the reason I chose the card I just bought. So, what did I buy?
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Well, I almost bought a XFX 7600GT AGP with dual dual-link DVI, but today I could get a very sweet deal on the card I bought, a XFX 6800GS AGP with dual DVI (single-link).
About the single/dual-link thing, a single-link DVI can do 2048×1536 as a resolution(on each monitor), while dual-link DVI can do 2560×1600. Well, I bought this card so I can go look for two nice TFTs but the chance I’ll end up with 2 Mac 30” Cinema displays in some garage sale is, well, near to nothing. (a 24” display can be driven from a single-link DVI)
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Since the card I bought is a GeForce 6800, I also get some nice graphics performance, which enables me to experiment a little further with gaming on Linux. Geez, that’s also already more than two years ago I’ve been experimenting with that… Oh my, time’s flying I guess…
Well, any how, my workstation which has been in the making for almost one and a half year nears it’s completion (just before it’s obsolete! ^_^)...
Before I can play with it any further, I’m updating my Gentoo-install… next thing after that will probably be installing Quake III, it’s been ages since I played that one *^_^*
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earlier on this site:
a ‘new’ graphicscard
borking videocard and lockpicktools
videocard blues
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If you are serious about running games in Linux, you may want to give Half-Life 2 a try, though the main problem is it requires Steam in order to run, meaning you’d be running two applications under emulation, and probably take a serious performance hit for it.
But if you can pull it off, HL2 is a great game…and Garry’s Mod 9 is a great time-waster as well.
Also, I’d say that if you were serious about gaming (I know you aren’t, but still), I’d see if you can find a copy of Winblows XP for cheap, since Vista is right around the corner, and try setting up a dual-boot system. Though in my experience with Kubuntu and XP, One will render the other useless. Dunno why, but that’s the way it is, I guess.
Playing Q3 on that kind of graphic card is not clever. Better take a look for more demanding games of course if they are existing on Linux.
Well looking back, HE DID do HL2 on his workstation once…
Try F.E.A.R _
I recommend Savage!
It’s free, and there’s a Linux version!
http://www.s2games.com/savage/
Runs at ~80FPS on a 6800 (I have the exact same card)
Ermm, also, just wondering: are you using TwinView or Xinerama for your dualscreen goodness?
Neverwinter Nights is a very nice Roleplaygame, a few days old but still nice graphics – and there is an official linux client for this! (a friend of mine installed it on his Gentoo-machine last week)
so, hf!
oh boy am I having fun! ;-) Savage and NN both look very nice, I tried to install Savage but ran into some problems with libwhatever it couldn’t find while it was there… Anyway, at this time I’ve been playing Q3 and sure, there are much more sophisticated games out there but now playing a game with everything to the extreme (16xAA 16xAF) and still maxing out at 90fps (at 1280×1024) gives me a big grin around my face. I first played this on a K6-2 300 with a VooDoo3 card… So, I’ve been having a small retro fragfest…
Pretty good…Since I have XP on my MacBook Pro (*shudder*), I’ll have to look into NN…I hear it’s a really nice game.
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