On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:42:32 +0000, rallee2{at}comcast.net wrote:

>Hello Derek and group
>
>> I'm curious as to why you put the cart before the horse, and didn't
>> check for video driver support BEFORE you purchased the nVidia 6600GT
>> card.  Such has been the way of OS/2 users since time began, after all.
>
>  It is difficult to keep the big picture when we get little snatches
stretched out over time and often threads splinter or branch off so it is
understandable that Derek or anyone might lose the gist of what's going on
overall.  This started as a bit of a lark in that around 4-5 years ago I
decided to remove OS/2 from my main multi-booting machine and build a
dedicated, networked box just for it primarily for two reasons:
>   1) LVM and associated partitioning conflicts
>   2) Hardware drivers and especially Video card drivers or lack thereof

Which doesn't fit in with you telling us about a brand new box running
2004 technology... where does 4-5 years ago come into it?  It's
irrelevant.

You just built this machine.  If you were planning on running OS/2 on
it, you should have checked it out first.

I'm afraid I find your reply confusing and hard to follow.  That you
should expect anyone to remember a thread, or even to search through
previous messages to FIND a thread is amusing.  As I recall, your
initial message was not in reply to anything else, which would indicate
an on-going discussion, so I didn't bother looking back.  Now that I've
done so, I see it was the first message on the subject you posted under
that header.

>So the fun experiment was to see if OS/2 would run (and experience it
*blaze* if it did) on this MSI-AMD64 box which is becoming the evolved main
machine.  It began to get serious when I was pleasantly surprised at how
easily it installed, basically requiring only updated hard drive files ie
Danis506 et al. and considered that while a dedicated, networked box is a
good solution, it does tend to become neglected over time or at least
that's what has happened with me since it is not the main machine.  So to
answer this question I bought the 6600 GT because it was the very best 3D
video card I could buy at the price range (under $200) given a bias against
Ati, largely based also on drivers since nVidia has excellent drivers and
supports Linux exceptionally well while Ati does not and I do indeed allow
loyalty to strongly affect my buying decisions choosing to support those
companies that choose to support alternate systems including OS/2 and Linux
.  The signs were there when I bought th

e card and have grown even greater since that nVidia is becoming in the
video field somewhat analagous to what Creative Labs was a few years ago in
the audio field, poised to dominate.

ATI isn't going anywhere, and nVidia isn't going to crush them...
Matrox fell out of the 3D race a long time ago, but there's no signs of
this race letting up any time soon.  Competition breeds innovation, and
they've been leap-frogging each other in the technical races for the
last five years.

What you call a "fun experiment", I call R&D... I've spent countless
hours trying to wedge current OS/2 code (eComStation 1.2 AMD64 Beta 2
and its predecessors) onto modern hardware, with mixed results.

Dual Opteron 246 with AGP - good.  Works with both ATI and nVidia cards
and SnapSE.

Dual-core Athlon64 4800+ with PCI Express - good on single core only...
load the SMP code, and it dies...  ugh.

...and so it goes.

Not all the stuff has worked, so it's cost me some money to find out...
much like the situation you find yourself in... difference is, I'm not
trying to get drivers for things not currently supported - I'm testing
things out to see if they work.  If they don't and I have to
back-track, no big deal.

>> Are you using 3D on your OS/2 machine?
>
>  To answer the 2nd question I am not presently concerned with 3D
acceleration in OS/2 since I have long since stopped trying to game in OS/2
and I'm very pleased with 3D gaming in Linux. So really all I need is a
driver that will handle 2D acceleration with the 6600 GT, even though it
looks as if I should have held out just a little longer for the new and
completely amazing 7800 which is almost as fast as 2 6800's in SLI !! 
However since all I need is a decent 2D support I admit to being reticent
to spend roughly $40 for the SNAP driver which might possibly even work at
some diminished but acceptable capacity.

Now you've really lost me... the MSI motherboard is an AGP, but you're
going on about SLI, which is the newer PCI Express bus...

Why would you complain about having to buy a different video card and a
SNAP driver for about a hundred bucks when you're talking about SLI
video cards which are easily hundreds of dollars each, not to mention
the added cost of an SLI-capable motherboard (and with it, the nVidia 4
chipset which may or may not have support for such things as the SATA
controllers, IDE controllers, audio and LAN)... ?

[snip more rambling and editorializing]

If you read through my post, and check the benchmarks I helpfully
included the URLs for, you'd find that for about US$100, you could set
yourself up with both 

1) a new ATI video card that gets equivalent or better scores on
Windows benchmarks as your nVidia 6600GT video card, and would perform
very well under OS/2 or eComStation or whatever flavour you're running,
as it's actually supported by the SNAP driver - in 2D mode - and 

2) buy the SNAP driver itself.


As an alternate, you could always contact SciTech and offer to throw
money their way so they'll code for your 6600GT.

Another alternative is to spend more money and make a choice with one
that's supported under OS/2, or one that works under Linux...  or step
back a few paces and pick a card that's supported very well under both,
and offers acceptable performance to you.

...and you could always build another box.

I'm afraid I don't have a magic bullet solution for you...  and no one
else has stepped into this minefield.

SNAP is basically "THE" solution for video drivers under OS/2 now, as
far as I'm aware... and yes, they'll expect to be paid for their
drivers.


-Derek (in a pretty foul mood for a Friday... with my apologies)

Derek W. Keoughan,
Finnegan Software, Inc.,  Brampton, Ontario, Canada  http://www.finnsoft.com
416-410-4774 phone - 800-258-0033 toll free - 905-846-5516 fax

Consulting, Networking, Cabling, Internet, Hardware, Software, Tech Support
eComStation, OS/2 Warp/Server, WinXP/2000/NT/Me/9x, Linux
Customized PURRformance PC's & Servers, OnSite Services, Installations
and Upgrades

= Celebrating 10 years of "happily purring" computing - Founded
1995-02-02 =

FinnSoft "CyberCat" logo clothing and more -
http://www.cafepress.com/finnsoft





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