Suggest a Graphics Card?

[n3x]

I'm looking for a good graphics card for less than US$150 (US$200 is okay, but preferably lower) that will work really well in linux and windows (for gaming...the only thing it's any good for). Preferable 128MB, but it has to be 64MB. Any suggestions? Thanks everyone!

Mods - wasn't sure where to put this. Please move it if it's in the wrong place.

[upnix]

My friend just picked up a Radeon 9000 PRO (64 RAM) for $140CAD.


I'd personally get an ATI card simply because the opensource drivers are decent. You can use the ATI Linux drivers (which I hear are about to get a lot better), or the drivers that come with XFree.


NVIDIA doesn't share with the XFree developers, so you -have- to use their drivers. Which is fine until you want to use something like XV.. or for some reason just can't/won't use their drivers.


My 2cents. I'm pretty behind the curve with my Rage128, but it'll still play Quake3 which is enough for now.


Chris

[Isaiah]

I have always believed NVIDIA's drivers beat ATI's hands down (have never seen a shootout) - is ATI really a better open-source advocate (I don't believe that's the case) - w00f

[rojaro]

infact ... the nvidia drivers SUCK. i am never buying a nvidia based card again until they revamp either their drivers so i can finally prelink kde, or even better open source them (so we can prelink them for sure).

point is, when using the nvidia drivers you get very good 3D performance but very bad application performance with stuff like kde as you cant prelink the binaries together with their libraries as long you are using the nvidia opengl drivers. so in order to have a fast and responsive system you have to disable the nvidia opengl drivers, and if you want 3d performance you'll get a sluggish running kde/gnome/mozilla/openoffice/etc in return. e.g prelinked konqueror fires up in somewhat under a second on my machine, but as soon as i swicht the opengl libs to the nvidia ones it takes konqueror like 5 seconds to load :(
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A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Alfred Renyi (*1921 - †1970)

[upnix]

[snutte]

Im going to recommend something like a Gefore4 Ti4200 or something like that. I have a Asus v8420. Ti4200 with 128mb ram. Its cheap and runs smooth with games like quake3 and americas army.
So you might wanna take a look at ASUS V9280S GeForce4 Ti4200-8X 128MB . Seems pretty good.

Thats my 2 cents

[SouthOfHeaven]

I use Gnome and currently have a Geforce 2 GTS 64mb i boght it for about 150$ CDN a while ago. I downloaded NVIDIA's drivers and its working like a charm, i tryed Unreal Tournament demo on linux and it works amaizing this is on a AMD XP 1700+ with 256mb ram(at that time) 7200rpm hd, also played Tribes2 for Linux, no problems with any of the games ive played so far. Comapring windows games with linux games, i highly believe benchmarks will be way better for linux, i cant believe how nice the games work in it, dont know if its the os or the videocard, might be a good combination i dont know. As far as drivers go i can tell you for sure that Geforce 2 GTS is supported with hardware acceleration.

[Isaiah]

From what I read here , if you want decent 3D on a ATI card you have to buy drivers

[Malakin]

If you're using it for gaming I'd go with an Nvidia FX5600, the Nvidia drivers have always been trouble free and fast. Prelinking barely even makes a difference on my system and don't forget it only effects application startup times, it's mainly going to benefit slower systems so it's not really that much of an issue if you're on a system new enough to do gaming on. The Geforce 4 ti4200's are getting cheaper but the fx5600 isn't much more, it's a dx9 part and its antialiasing/anisotropic filtering performance is massively improved over the 4 ti series.

I have no idea what the ATI support for newer cards is like in Linux but If you do go for ATI I'd suggest a Radeon 9500 Pro, if you can't find one as they've been discontinued then a 9600 although the 9600's are slower. The pre 9500 stuff is all based on older technology and it's fairly slow.

Here are some benchmarks comparing the cards, of course this is using the windows drivers, and again like I said I have no idea what the performance of the ATI cards is like in Linux.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1812&p=14

[upnix]

[Isaiah]

[nalin]

my .02...
I like nvidia, i would rather buy a card now that proforms now (albiet through binary drivers) then a card that is expected to someday proform better...also I think the aformentioned article cleared up some of the ati is open, nvidia is closed arguments.

A few months back i was using an ati expert series card, took 3 days to figure out how to get dri support and necesitated recompiling x with every kernel upgrade (which incedently broke stuff its documented in one of my old posts). When ut2k3 came out I upgraded to a gainward geforce4ti golden sample (~$150 mabye 6 months back on pricewatch), nice card, easy to get working, requires minimal documentation, etc. I cant say enough good things about the card...

While I would expect that ati's latest offerings eliminate some of the hassle with dri and the like the bottom line for me was that nvidias binary drives provided proformance which was similar to that under more prominant OS's, which was not the case with ati
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The "shopping" key is a whole different beast, "m" gets stuck and you hit it again - "shopping" gets stuck and you end up closing 129 instances of konqueror - thats why the hotkeys people are bastards

[upnix]

[Isaiah]

I think all you have to do is go to ATI's website to see where most of that info came from

[nalin]

[Isaiah]

[n3x]

Hey everyone - sorry, I've been out of town. Seems like I've provoked quite a discussion here... You're all being very helpful! I love gentoo forums

I still can't make a decision though! I'll have to ponder it a bit more.

rgds.
james

EDIT: In order to help me make my decision, how do the two companies compare in terms of ease of installation for the drivers on gentoo?

[gregorybritt]

I gotta tell you I love the new ATI cards. I'll be honest, getting the driver to work was a pain, but I had virtually no knowledge of the various drivers out there for 3D accel when I first looked at it. Plus I had some extra complications 'cause of the NForce2 AGPGART module not being available in my stock kernel (think I went w/ the ac sources or something). But it finally came down to disabling 8x AGP support in my BIOS, emerge ati-drivers, use the fglrx module and I was good to go--running Enemy Territory like a champ on my 9700 Pro.

As somebody else posted, ATI is geared to release a significant driver upgrade for Linux soon. This was supposed to be in June, so it might be out here soon. (There was an interview w/ one of the devels I saw from a link in the forums).

A lot of people are paranoid about ATI because their driver support in the past was god-awful, but they've finally learned their lesson and are taking to monthly driver releases (at least w/ Catalyst for Windows--they might have something similar in the woodworks for Linux as well).

All things being equal (assuming a perfect driver for both ATI & NVidia), ATI's cheaper cards will smack the cheaper NVidia cards around...there's tons of benchmarks out there to prove that...just looks at tomshardware or anandtech.

Hope that helped.

[Isaiah]

[n3x]

Alright, well sounds like if I wait for a little while before I buy, I'll get some better drivers, better cards and I'll have more money... I'll just keep a look out for whenever ATI releases their new drivers and then I'll get my hands on a nice new ATI card.

Thanks again everyone!

-james

[Nicom]

How would one do a graphics benchmark under linux anyways? Surely glxgears can't be the only way. Quake3 fps? Would it be accurate enough? Not that I even have two decent cards to compare, but I'd like to see linux benchmarks to make an informed descision when I go to buy a new card sometime this year.

[Malakin]