Recomendations for a video card

Looking at what was being posted on the two lists, I made a completely uneducated guest and thought this list made more sense.

I want to do some croquet development with two machines involved.  My Powerbook G4 works fine.  But, some things don't seem to work as well/like the windows version in the nifty tutorials.

But, my Dell throws errors all over the place.  It's roughly a year old; a Dimension 4600 (P4 3.2G).  I believe I've got two possible problems.  The ram stinks (384M) and the video is onboard.  The onboard video seems to use a shared memory approach. 

In my ideal world, I'm going to add the right video card and several gigs of ram and discover (woo hoo) that I can run two vmware sessions with croquet in each.  VMWare creates a virtual private network and I'm guessing (until I get the ram) that you can run several VMWare sessions simultaneously to create a completely virtual network of virtual machines.  Bottom line, I could have two virtual computers that were just croquet stations.

Slightly less ideal would be to run Croquet directly under Kubuntu (aka ubuntu with kde)
.

So questions...

1) Is my guess that I need to get a regular video card accurate/reasonable

2) If I need a regular video card for either my ideal scenario or just to get Croquet to run, can anyone recommend video cards.  Since I don't game, I'm trying to steer away from egg cookers. 

3) Anyone have any experience with croquet under vmware.

Tim Wood schrieb:
>
>
> 1) Is my guess that I need to get a regular video card accurate/reasonable
>
on board video cards come with bad opengl cards, so perhaps you try to
get better opengl drivers for your card.
> 2) If I need a regular video card for either my ideal scenario or just
> to get Croquet to run, can anyone recommend video cards.  Since I
> don't game, I'm trying to steer away from egg cookers.
>
there are nvidia graphic cards with passive cooler
> 3) Anyone have any experience with croquet under vmware.
Croquet needs opengl and vmware only simulates a vga graphics cards (at
least under linux)

Please look at the Mesa3D project.  Its drivers can be compiled under
Windows, and work enough to allow an SiS chipset to run City of Heroes
and Second Life.  This is at a crawl on my 500MHz laptop, though newer
CPUs should be able to work better.

As for me, I would recommend an nVidia GeForce 4200MX, or even an
older GeForce 3.  That runs Croquet just fine.  A note about drivers,
though: Newer drivers don't properly support older cards, no matter
what nVidia says.  Find the driver that first supported your hardware,
and go perhaps 3 or 4 versions up -- no more.

-Kyle H

On 6/20/06, Jens Lincke <[hidden email]> wrote: