Radeon or Geforce4 for linux?

[Job]

I'm going to get myself a new video card, and im thinking of getting a Radeon 9000 (or something around there) or a Geforce4 MX 440 (or...yeah).

The performance of both cards is very good, but what I want to know, is how well do they run in linux?

The Geforce comes with drivers but has no DRI support, the Radeon has some(I think) DRI support, but as far as I can tell the drivers are still experimental.

have any of you used one of these cards with linux? do they work great? terrible? was the installation a nightmare?

thanks,

[Floog]

Originally posted by Job
I'm going to get myself a new video card, and im thinking of getting a Radeon 9000 (or something around there) or a Geforce4 MX 440 (or...yeah).


Here's a good link for the Nvidia side of things: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_1.0-2960

I've used both ATI and Nvidia cards. In late 2000 I was able to scoop up an ATI Xpert 2000 card used for $25. It had 32 megs of vid ram. Great stable card and handled 3d graphics pretty nicely-- I tested it out extensively with alot of Soldier of Fortune gaming in Linux. A few months ago I picked up a GeForce 3 card with 64 megs. of vid ram for $99. I am extremely happy with this card. Excellent performance and the nvidia drivers were easy to install. The documentation that came with them was very helpful.

As the competition heats up between these two players, it will only mean greater graphics and gaming for us. It's such a tough call--- both companies' new models are receiving such positive reviews that it's probably a coin toss.

[Daedra]

Personally I would recommend the Geforce just because Nvidia's linux drivers are more mature

[Timothy L. Miller]

Just picked up a Radeon 9000 128 MB for $99 today. It does not work with ati drivers from XFree86 4.2, but that was kinda to be expected. It does, however, work with vesa drivers, although 1152x864 resolution won't, so I'm forced to go to 1280x1024. Just thought this might be interested in this little bit of knowledge. I'm off to see if I can find drivers. Oh yeah, gotta install it in windows too! :-) Although I doubt it'll be as easy as getting it to work in linux, changing one line from ati to vesa, and changing 65536 to 131072.

[bdl]

I think the real question is, does it really matter to have a high end 3d gaming card for linux? Thats what you're talking about anyway right? Most of the Linux games I've seen will do fine with a GeForce 2 level card, you don't need anything else because the interface isn't there to take advantage of the technology in the card. If you intend on playing alot of graphics intense games under Windows then it's a different ballgame, what with the recent production of the ATI Radeon 9700 and the upcoming GeForce cards, along with Direct X 9.0 that's supposedly going to be a big step up for game programmers. I stick with the line of GeForce chipsets, they work great under Linux, and as Daedra mentioned, the drivers are much more mature (and in fact, actually exist!).