Should I get a geforce4?

hadoque · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:08 pm Post subject: Should I get a geforce4?

Hi
I have an old pentium 3 that I have connected to my Tv and run freevo on. It's been nice and stable and I've used it for 4-5 years. Now I'm starting to think about upgrading it since it tends to play DVD's a bit choppy some times.
I stumbled on something about Geforce4 having hardware mpeg acceleration, which could be a cheap way of getting some moore juice, but I'm having a hard time finding information about how this works in Linux. Do I need a special driver to use the acceleration? Is it hard work getting it working? Can I use it in framebuffer mode? Is it at all worth getting? Am I better of just getting a better motherboard and processor?

Thanks for any opinions on this.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3530

Last I heard, the GEForce 5200 was the one that had hardware mpeg accelerating that worked with XVMC, and the rest of the GEForce line had too many quirks of one sort or another. A quick google for "nvidia 5200" shows some hits in the $20-$30 range.

That said, I don't know if a new motherboard would just be a better bet.
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danomac · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 4:50 pm Post subject:

Not all of the GeForce4 cards had hardware acceleration.

My GeForce4 MX 440 based card does, but I remember reading reports that earlier ones didn't. I use the tainted nvidia kernel modules to get hardware acceleration.

I still use this card on my PC today (Athlon XP 3200+). It wasn't very hard to get direct rendering enabled. So far it's played everything that I've tossed at it.

(BTW, the very new nvidia drivers removed support for the GeForce4. x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9639 works quite well, even with x264.)

The problem is how long the older drivers will stay in portage.

hadoque · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 7:06 pm Post subject:

So, you just compiled the kernel module and it worked? How can you know if the accelaration is active or not?

danomac · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:12 am Post subject:

The nvidia driver itself is doing the hardware acceleration. I can see it's active in the Xorg log:

hadoque · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:19 am Post subject:

Thanks for the tips. I just realised i have a geforce4 TI4600 in my other computer. So I'm gonna do a swap and see what it gives.