August 07, 2003
Video drivers redux
Note to self, do not, under penalty of death, ever fuck around with the video card drivers for this piece of shit ancient Voodoo Banshee AGP card.
Talk about a huge goat f*ck! The whole one-company-bought-up-by-another combined with major-operating-system-changes made for some really horrible cases of orphaned hardware. I have such a case right here.
Apparently having bought a card manufactured by one company (soon to have been bought out) based on a chipset from another company (also soon to have been bought out) installed on an OS soon to have it's driver architecture radically updated were just too many variables in the equation. As a result it's nigh-on-fucking-impossible to get the damned thing working in Windows 2000. (and you 'use some other OS' people can just shut the hell up)
By random chance I managed to find a set of drivers that works. Thank you Internet Archive! For those likewise suffering with one of these damned cards driver version 5.00.2112.35 seems to work. The 2195 version just crashes so don't bother even trying it.
I offer this bit of advice humbling hoping some other poor bastard googling for a solution finds it.
Meanwhile, what video card offers the best desktop application performance?
I'd like to get something really geared toward kick-ass performance for productivty applications. As in, 3D performance isn't critical (I have another box for Unreal). What's the best price performer in this class? I need to run 1600x1200 in at least 16bit color at up to 75mHz refresh rate.
It'd be doubly-cool if it also supported dual displays. Do the ones with SVGA and DVI connectors require using a DVI only display on the other port? Or is there a way to get an SVGA monitor to work on there with a (cheap) adapter cable?
