Upgrading My 32-MB, 4x, 1.5v Dual-Head Video Card

Greetings, everyone!

With some reluctance, I ask such a simple question. I have been researching for a week, and I would appreciate your advice.

I still have my self-built 2.0-GHz, Pentium-4-based system, on which I had been dual-booting Windows XP Professional and SuSE Linux Professional.

I have decided to dedicate this computer to running Linux only, however. :)

(I wish that I could afford to rebuild it again, so that it would be faster, but Linux makes very efficient use of hardware. I am, howerver, gettng a free copy of SuSE Linux 10.1 (as payment for an audio Web advertisement that I wrote for an "e-tailer" that specializes in Linux distributions and training CDs), so I will be upgrading from SuSE Linux 8.3 Professional, whenever 10.1 is released.

I would like to upgrade the 32-MB, dual-head (VGA) AGP 4x (1.5v) Matrox Millenium G-450 video card in my Linux system. The Matrox card is a fine 2-D card, but it does not even run a 3-D screen saver very well, despite the fact that I enabled hardware acceleration with help from this forum.

This computer's MSI 845 Ultra motherboard requires a 4x, 1.5-volt AGP video card, and it is difficult for me to find a 64- or 128-MB, dual-head (VGA) card that is compatible with Linux and has not been discontinued! :)

Does anyone have any recommendations? Given Linux's efficient use of system resources, will I notice an upgrade from a 32-MB, dual-head card to a 64- or 128-MB, dual-head video card? (I still want two VGA connectors, which is an additional complication.)

Perhaps my Matrox Millenium G-450 card is faulty, because enabling hardware acceleration did not bring about the increase in performance that the many kind people here who helped me predicted or expected?

I would appreciate any and all advice.

Thank you very much, in advance, for your time, patience and help!

Cordially,

David

Pretty much any AGP card should do the trick for you. From what I can find essentially all newish AGP cards support 1.5v and even if they're 8x cards they should work fine at 4x as well. As far as whether you'll notice a difference, that's very subjective. It depends on what you're doing (your screensavers should run smoothly at the very least). You may or may not notice it in general use. A basic 2d desktop only requires so much graphics processing power so there comes a point where it no longer makes a difference. Below is a link to 200 or so AGP cards on NewEgg and all of them should be fine (although some don't have dual-head, but that's pretty obvious).

Link to AGP cards on NewEgg

What ever you do, buy nvidia. They have excellent linux support, not open source though. The duel heads work great under linux.

Right, I forgot to mention that. ATI's made strides in Linux driver support but it's still not as good as nVidia (as far as the closed source drivers go anyway, the open source ATI drivers do support some 3d acceleration, so that's a little bonus for them).

As to the Matrox card-- are you using the Matrox framebuffer driver? That might make a difference. I had a 16MB G450 that could do simple 3D stuff just fine.