# which gfx card is best for linux

## st. anger

I currently have a tnt2, but i wanna get a new card. 

whats out there now that has the best performance and support under linux?

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## Mpemba Effect

Any Nvidia card is well supported under Linux  :Smile: 

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## S_aIN_t

i also think that the best way to go is with a crad made by nvidia.

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## broschi

But at least with ATI you get OSS drivers, if you wan't performance however i'd go with Nvidia.

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## st. anger

so, should I stay wth tnt2, or is it worth it to upgrade to a geforce4?

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## phelan

 *broschi wrote:*   

> But at least with ATI you get OSS drivers, if you wan't performance however i'd go with Nvidia.

 

OSS? don't you mean OpenSource? OSS is short for Open Sound System. Or for what does it stand too?  :Confused: 

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## guero61

I concur.  Although parts of the NVIDIA drivers are proprietary, the cards have excellent performance in and support for Linux.  We now have a comparable driver (4191) to the Windows side (used to be a revision or so behind), and performance is superb, IMHO.

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## broschi

 *phelan wrote:*   

> OSS? don't you mean OpenSource? OSS is short for Open Sound System. Or for what does it stand too? 

 

Well since the OSS uses a OSS license then OSS has a legitimate use of the "OSS" term so OSS as you all know here (probably because of the multimedia forum) should have another name to avoid confusion.  :Very Happy:  Or we could give the term to the open sound system and define it as an OSI (open source initiative) rather than OSS (open source software).

I have a GF2 and love it both under Linux and Windows, I'm just saying that if somebody want's to be a hardcore "OSI member" they should buy hardware that complies with any of these licenses.

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## mhuhtala

We need high-performance OpenGL 3d graphics on laptops at work and have had the misfortune of dealing with ATI cards in IBM laptops. The hardware itself may be ok (well kind of, you get a working motherboard from IBM on the second or 3rd try), but getting Linux support for hw OpenGL has been a very bumpy ride. The XFree ATI drivers haven't worked on the laptop graphics cards without patching until very recently, and even then the stability and performance leave things to be desired. I have scary memories of scooping patches for the agpgart module from the Linux-kernel mailing list and applying them manually because patch refused to deal with the formatting for some reason. We have also used the commercial drivers from Xi Graphics, and they give much better performance but have some weird bugs in the OpenGL implementation. I'm sure these will be fixed in time.

Anyhow, right now I'd say getting hardware OpenGL to work on a Linux laptop is *much* easier using NVidia cards and drivers compared to ATI. Not that NVidia did not have its own OGL quirks.

M

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## oniq

 *xamn wrote:*   

> so, should I stay wth tnt2, or is it worth it to upgrade to a geforce4?

 

If you're going to upgrade to Geforce4 wait a couple months until GeforceFX comes out so the Geforce4 prices drop, you won't need FX for a long while anyway.

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