Supported Video Cards
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!!! Please note that Intel GMA cards are known to have very poor and incomplete OpenGL support, they will not be able to run FlightGear with all features working !!!
This is meant to become a list of those video cards that are known to have goodOpenGL support to also run the most recent versions of FlightGear, this is currently largely based on contents taken from Hardware Recommendations. Please help maintain this list so that fellow FlightGear users can more easily make hardware decisions.
Basically, you should be fine with any NVIDIA or ATI card that is not older than 12-18 months and that has at least 256 MB of *dedicated* texture memory; however, you need to take into account that some of the newer features in FlightGear may not work as expected or may not even work altogether with older hardware.
In general, 3D cards that make use of shared memory should be avoided (PCI express cards that share memory using "HyperMemory" or "TurboCache" are ok though!). When buying a new card, 256MB dedicated memory should be considered the absolute minimum, 512MB or even 1024MB would be better in the sense that they provide more resources and are likely to be able to run also future versions of FlightGear with possibly more stringent requirements.
Also, if you intend to use FlightGear under Linux you may first want to check whether the driver for your card is fully supported under Linux (and your X version) or not, in general linux driver support is considered to be better for nvidia-based products than for ATI ones, however both manufacturers provide primarily closed-source drivers, in binary form.
In addition, for products from both ATI & nvidia it is not unusual to notice that the same machine/hardware setup performs "better" (in the sense of reached average framerates, using identical startup&runtime settings) under Win32 than under Linux, this is often an indicator for the unfortunate fact that Win32 OpenGL driver implementations tend -at least so far- to be more completely and efficiently implemented than the linux ones.
Currently, you can basically forget about using any Matrox cards as FlightGear is very heavy on textures, but only the high-end matrox cards will have sufficient capabilities to deal with FlightGear's requirements.
Also, most Intel GMA video cards are known to cause lots of trouble due to their poor support of more advanced OpenGL features such as shaders.
3D graphic cards that are known to work
Nvidia
- GTX 260M
- GeForce 9800GT
- GeForce 8600GTS
- GeForce 7900GS
- GeForce 7600
- GeForce 7300GT
- GeForce 6 series
- GeForce FX series
- GeForce 4 series
- GeForce MX420/440 (64Mb)
For problems with nvidia chips, take a look at this article.
External links
ATI
- All Radeon cards work
- FireGL cards are known to work.
- Other ATI card are problematic
For problems with ATI chips, see this article.