In brief - I need/want fast 2d performance with good visual quality, and don't really care about 3d. Am I better off dusting off an ancient Matrox G400 to replace a less-ancient nVidia 7600 GT?
Seems to me that all of the performance emphasis these days is on 3d. The 2d performance is assumed, neglected, denegrated, whatever. The recent OSS vs Catalyst numbers on ATI article highlights that.
My job has no need whatsoever for 3d, and I don't run any sort of eye candy that requires it, either. For my job, 2d performance and visual quality are everything. The company buys high-performance graphics cards, but these days that means fast 3d, which is irrelevant. Hopefully fast 3d implies fast 2d, but looking at the recent ATI article, that's not necessarily the case.
I've seen that the nouveau drivers are faster for 2d than the proprietary nVidia drivers, but properly installing nouveau is rather disruptive, for now. I'm sure it will get easier as the new DRM/DRI stuff goes mainline, but for now it's not. I also have an old Matrox G400 gathering dust in a cabinet, and I'm wondering if it might actually be faster for 2d. The video quality of the matrox g400 was legendary in its time, though I've now got an LCD instead of a CRT, so that probably doesn't matter as much.
Does anyone know of collections of 2d X11 benchmarks that might help me sort his out? A bit of fiddling with google hasn't helped, so far. There just isn't much emphasis on 2d peformance, these days.
Seems to me that all of the performance emphasis these days is on 3d. The 2d performance is assumed, neglected, denegrated, whatever. The recent OSS vs Catalyst numbers on ATI article highlights that.
My job has no need whatsoever for 3d, and I don't run any sort of eye candy that requires it, either. For my job, 2d performance and visual quality are everything. The company buys high-performance graphics cards, but these days that means fast 3d, which is irrelevant. Hopefully fast 3d implies fast 2d, but looking at the recent ATI article, that's not necessarily the case.
I've seen that the nouveau drivers are faster for 2d than the proprietary nVidia drivers, but properly installing nouveau is rather disruptive, for now. I'm sure it will get easier as the new DRM/DRI stuff goes mainline, but for now it's not. I also have an old Matrox G400 gathering dust in a cabinet, and I'm wondering if it might actually be faster for 2d. The video quality of the matrox g400 was legendary in its time, though I've now got an LCD instead of a CRT, so that probably doesn't matter as much.
Does anyone know of collections of 2d X11 benchmarks that might help me sort his out? A bit of fiddling with google hasn't helped, so far. There just isn't much emphasis on 2d peformance, these days.
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