martin dupras wrote:

Hi,

I'm using PD with GEM on RH linux 7.1, with a 2x1.7GHz pentium III xeon box.

I'm considering getting a second graphics card for the sole purpose of displaying GEM graphics; in other words I want to use the default graphics card (an Nvidia MX2? The exact model escapes me at present) to display the gui stuff, while the newer card displays the GEM graphics on a separate screen or projector.

cool hardware.

no (consumer) graphics-card will outrun nvidia's geForce(whatever version) when doing openGL (like Gem) on the other hand, the geforce2-mx is rather not-so-good than any other geforce (i think) so if your current card is too slow, i could only recommend a geforce2-gts or geforce3 (i do not think, that the geforce4 will be worth it's money (very personal opinion) - and the geforce4-mx will quite certainly be slower than high-end geforce3-cards). and of course, you could go and buy nvidia's quadro (which is not very much different from the geforce as it uses the same chipset) if your current card is ok, why not buying another cheap card (like a matrox-g450 or something) as your GUI-card ?

note: you will only get hardware-acceleration on one single card ! (although, if it is dual-headed you will get hw-accel on both heads, if the card supports this) so you will have to make sure, that your geforce is the one with glx/dri enabled. this means some tricking around with the XF86Config-4.

nvidia's cards are quite good supported by linux. the same goes for matrox-cards, but they are quite slow

mfg.c.sadr IOhannes