Video Card Recommendations

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 06:52:35PM -0400, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> If I was buying a new video card today for a desktop machine, what
> should I buy?  I want complete support under Linux, obviously, and
> preferably an Open Source driver rather than a 3rd-party binary.
> 
> Most importantly, it should be able to show movies without bogging down
> too much, but otherwise I'm not looking for much in the way of
> performance.  Reading text in a terminal is not too challenging, after
> all.  Thanks.

Well it depends on your needs:

3D opengl: nvidia using non-free drivers.  There simply is no other
choice that works.

2D only: Well most nvidia cards work just fine using the free nv driver.
I believe it does have some xvideo support, but I am not entirely sure.
I do tend to use the non-free drivers myself so I can use 3D
applications.

Matrox used to have very good free drivers, but that seemed to stop with
the 450 or 550 chip, and has been just about non existant ever since.  I
haven't really looked at them since, since they don't make cards for the
kind of use I want anymore.

ATI makes some nice hardware too, unfortunately they have a reputation
of crappy driver support, especially for linux (although I have enough
personal bad experience with their windows drivers too to last a
lifetime.)

intel has rather good free driver support as far as I can tell, but only
do integrated video in their chipsets (which still makes them the #1
selling graphics chips).  Don't expect 3D, but at least 2D seems to run
just fine on most of them.

If it was me buying something, I would get an nvidia and put up with the
non-free drivers.

Lennart Sorensen
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