My experience has been that ATI and nVidia have the same problems when it comes to Linux. If you buy a newish card you're going to have to use their propritary drivers. And when it comes to the propritary linux drivers nVidia wins hands down every time. But as you said you're looking to use the built in open source drivers that come with Xorg. For that you're probably going to have to find an older ATI card. I have heard there are some nVidia cards out there that support 3d with the open source drivers, but I've not seen them personally (google might be helpful here). I can tell you a Voodoo 3000 AGP will work, but it's an EXTREEMLY old card. Arguably there are more older ATI cards that work with the OS drivers because there was an "accidental" release of spec info on ATIs part a couple years ago that covered quite a few of their cards. This royally pissed off a lot of people at ATI and people that contracted with ATI in developing the technology (or so the story goes). There is also talk that nVidia might be open sourcing some of their older cards drivers soon. I'm hopefull that goes through.
<br><br>Your best bet is to do a web search for known cards that work well in Linux. It will probably be ATI but you might find some nVidia that work. In a quick search I found these:<br><a href="http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_ATi_Open-Source_Drivers">
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_ATi_Open-Source_Drivers</a><br><a href="http://www.j5live.com/?p=194">http://www.j5live.com/?p=194</a><br><br>Gentoo often has a lot of great documentation, no matter what distro you're running. From their info it looks like you'd want to get a radeon card between 7000 and 9250
<br>Buy hardware that you know has been tested and works well with the OS drivers.<br><br>Apparently the ATI cards that work with the open source driver are all R100 or R200 series:<br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon</a><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100</a><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200
</a><br><br>I'd say pick one from the R200 list and you should be fine. Do a search for configuring the card you choose to make sure it works well with the OS drivers.<br><br>Good luck, hope this helps<br><br>-Gamble<br>
<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/8/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dave J. Hala Jr.</b> <<a href="mailto:dave@58ghz.net">dave@58ghz.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I ended up buying a diamond stealth s120 card from Staples that uses the<br>Radeon 9550 chipset. I downloaded the ati proprietary driver and<br>installed it. Redhat-config-xfree86, doesn't report the memory correctly<br>for the vid card -even when using the ATI driver (fglrx), but it appears
<br>to be operating correctly. Secondly, in XF86Config, I added "1680x1050"<br>to the modes line.<br><br>It looks great and works great.<br><br><br>On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 10:23, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:<br>> On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 10:12 -0600, Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:
<br>> > I'm doing a flat panel and video card upgrade on my RHEL 3.x WS<br>> > computer.<br>> ><br>> > I'm currently running a gforce mx4 video card using the nvidia driver<br>> > with KDE. Its really kind of a *pita* due to the fact whenever you do a
<br>> > kernel update you need to do a driver update.<br>> ><br>> > I'm wondering if I switch to an ATI card can I still get decent X<br>> > performance using an ATI driver that doesn't have the same pitfalls as
<br>> > the Nvidia drivers? If I buy a new card it will be something common and<br>> > costing less than $100.00<br>><br>> I have a ATI Radeon Mobility X600 in my laptop running FC6 with <a href="http://X.org">
X.org</a><br>> 7.1.1 and the stock ATI driver. I get 50-60 FPS with PPRacer in 800x600<br>> mode and around 1900 FPS in glxgears.<br>><br>> From what I've heard, unless you have the latest and greatest ATI card
<br>> or a really old one you can get decent performance out of them with the<br>> drivers in recent versions of <a href="http://X.org">X.org</a>. There is also some work going on<br>> to develop an open-source 3D driver for nVidia cards, but those aren't
<br>> quite ready yet.<br>><br>> Jeff<br>><br>><br>><br>><br>> ______________________________________________________________________<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> Cialug mailing list
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<br>Dave J. Hala Jr., President <<a href="mailto:dave@osis.us">dave@osis.us</a>><br>641.485.1606 <a href="http://www.osis.us">www.osis.us</a><br>Save a life: Adopt a shelter animal!<br><br>_______________________________________________
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