I use NVIDIA and am for the most part happy with the cards, I've gone through about 4 of them in the last two years if you count my laptop cards too.
I can't say good things about ATI. I've known a number of people with them and its always been a hassle to get things working. That having been said, there's been a lot of buzz about ATI contributing to open source drivers, and the coming wave of super duper ATI Linux drivers; I just don't know anyone who has had a positive experience to date. I know a few people who are having decent success with the intel chipset based cards. In general, they're certainly enough to run compiz fusion or warzone 2100. I don't keep up with the latest in graphics cards, but I've read some articles about benchmarking not adequately describing cards' performance. I know there's a site out there somewhere that does its reviews by actually playing a number of the most popular current games on the card, and that would probably be your best bet. Unfortunately, this is something that I haven't looked at for a while so I can't point you to particular resources. On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 12:08 -0400, Nick Cummings wrote: > I'll probably be getting a new video card (for desktop and gaming use) > in the coming months, and I'm trying to figure out which manufactures > (of chipsets) to look at to get one that will work well in Linux. I > know the wisdom I used to be basically just buy an card with an NVIDIA > chipset, because they were supposedly the only one for which decent 3D > acceleration drivers existed for Linux. Is that still the case? > > In more recent times I've heard some praise for Intel video chipsets > under Linux, and I've read that VIA and ATI are supposedly opening up > their specs so that Linux drivers should improve. Are any of these > others worth a serious look, or will they all still perform poorly > compared to NVIDIA in Linux? I should probably emphasize that whatever > games I might be playing would be under Linux too (possibly using > Crossover games, I don't dual boot). > > Two additional questions for extra credit: 1) My motherboard says it > has "1 PCI Express x16 slot but only provides x8 bandwidth." Would I be > correct in thinking that I should be able to put a x16 card in there and > have it work (with reduced performance) until a future date when I get a > better motherboard? 2) I've been looking for some price vs. performance > charts, comparing price and benchmark scores across a wide variety of > cards, but I haven't found many recent ones. Anyone seen any recently? > > Thanks, > > Nick >
