Another Opinion Among Many

My brother is a saint, whether he owns up to it or not. This Christmas has been a thin one and I did not expect to receive much. I didn’t. That’s all in good stride. Thank you to all my family members that did not embarrass the poor guy by giving gifts when he could not give any to you. You got it. Right on.

My brother (and my sister, in a different way) is different. Without talking constantly or keeping up all the time, our family, especially me and my siblings, are close. We can go a long time without any contact and resume as if there was no break. I don’t know what contributes to this intimacy with distance, but I can only attribute our parents for it.

Back to the geeky stuff. My Frankenputer will be getting a bit of a boost (OK, a large one). I stuffed the first video card I could get into the AGP slot, which was an ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 8 MB of memory. This card is really getting long in the tooth and doesn’t really seem to have proper 3D support and won’t run glxgears with any more than 4 or 5 FPS. Enter Ian’s Radeon 9500 Pro. Gidddeyup! The 128MB of memory and the arm’s length list of features will be fun to explore. This is a card that will allow cool games to be played on my poor little Franken-puter. I may even start to like them. Getting the flgrx driver installed is my next fun task, I guess. Who wants to stick with 60FPS, when you can get more, etc? Thanks, bro, for the Christmas gift that you didn’t likely realize that you gave me.

update: I’ve installed Linux on this machine, so I’ve been working with Kubuntu, Gentoo, Kororaa, and Freespire. I’ve not had a chance to check out the performance of this card with Kororaa or Kubuntu yet, but with Gentoo (a fresh GRP install yesterday from the 2006.1 Live C), I tried to get 3D Accelleration working with the x.org/DRI drivers. I get it, but glxgears locks up the computer hard after about 7 seconds running. I don’t install ssh by default, so I can’t access the machine remotely to see if I can kill the offending process or debug it. Freespire installed with the proprietary ATI fglrx driver and this problem doesn’t seem to have presented itself, and the FPS are insane!

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ glxgears
16261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3252.183 FPS
16295 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3258.937 FPS
16427 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3285.261 FPS
16463 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3292.429 FPS

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
1942 frames in 5.0 seconds = 388.400 FPS
1663 frames in 5.0 seconds = 332.600 FPS
2159 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.800 FPS
2156 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.200 FPS
2157 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.400 FPS

What an insane difference between this setup and the old one @ around 1100FPS