Video

Video cards that don’t work with Linux.

• ATI x300 in a Dell Inspiron 9300: when changing resolutions above 1024x768, the desktop appears to “tile” which makes using the max resolution of 1440x900 illegible and therefore, improbable. Consistent in both SUSE 9.3 and Ubuntu 5.10.
• Gateway M305 laptop won’t do it’s native resolution of 1024x768 without a commercial X server from Xi Graphics.
• ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M
• S3 ViRGE/MX+MV (hangs and display errors with acceleration enabled)
• S3 Savage IX (No 3D acceleration)
• S3 Savage4 (Twister K - KN133) (No 3D acceleration)
• PowerVR Kyro2 (kernel 2.6+) (No 3D acceleration)
• ATI Radeon FireGL-T2 – Proprietary driver doesn’t do suspend/resume, and doesn’t switch to text mode without crashing.
• Matrox parhelia, triplehead card. The driver is beta, binary only and 2D only. Fortunately, triplehead (even with 3D) is possible using any supported dualhead AGP card plus any PCI card that works well as a secondary video card.
• SiS 740
• 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 (no longer supports 3d and the left over 3d software drivers doesn’t compile and is also missing helper files.)
• ATI R500
• ATI Radeon x1600 PRO PCIE (RV 530)

No TV Tuner

• ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder (ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD Radeon 7200)

• 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV

• AverMedia USB 2.0

  Unstable 3D

• ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder (ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD Radeon 7200)

• ATI Mobility Family ( ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1 -IGP 320M -IGP340M ?)

• ATI Radeon R200 Series (8500-9250) with proprietary ATI fglrx drivers. However, they work very well with the free radeon driver included in X.org and XFree86.

• The Mobility cards DO work, tested with real-life applications such as MythTV and Castle Wolfenstein, please try the Gatos drivers (http://gatos.sourceforge.net), upgrade your kernel to something later than 2.4.20 and also do not forget to bother the manufacturer since they usually make huge alterations to what you would expect from a “Radeon” card (think shared memory, limited GPU, fewer input/output ports, etc).

The original Radeon AIW (Radeon R100 QD) TV tuner and 3D works for the same reason described above by another poster; I have one myself. Use the most recent stable X.Org, GATOS drivers, and 2.6 kernel and you should be fine. I do admit that this AIW doesn’t get along with certain chipsets/motherboards too well in Linux, so keep that in mind.

Broken under Linux

• Matrox Parhelia series. Binary blob driver for Linux, only x86 support. Did not compile successfully on my machine (ie the blob->kernel interface did not compile). What a shame, older Matrox cards has great (open-source driver) Linux support.

  For NVidia issues

• In some cases a Linux instablitity issue CAN be replicated in windows, indicating a faulty card.

• The newer 3d GFX cards require a lot of power, check this link to see if your system can hack it. http://www.jscustompcs.com/power\_supply/

• For the most active and uptodate information (even refered to by NVidia) http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=268907ea3d655d99ac1051a7b5540404&forumid=13

• The open source drivers lacks 3D and multihead due to lacking specs http://www.tjansen.de/xfree-features/

Compatibility List

Free3d.org - Maintains a list of open-source driver supported video cards.