I'm using an NVIDIA card at the moment with the proprietary nvidia
driver. I've had some success with this card (NVS 140m) using the
nouveau driver and once some debian / ubuntu packages show up in a
stable repo, I'll make the switch.
If I were to purchase a new card today, I would strongly consider radeon
because of the radeonhd driver:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon#FOSS_drivers
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd
-Nathan
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:08:08PM -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
>
