# 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.

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## 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

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## 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  :Question: 

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## 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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## upnix

 *Isaiah wrote:*   

> 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 

 

I know that NVIDIA doesn't share information with the XFree developers. ATI does, which is why there are decent open source drivers for things like the (older) Radeons and my r128. The 'nv' driver is actually quite crummy because NVIDIA doesn't share.

I have heard good things about the NVIDIA drivers, but they aren't very "open".

Chris

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## 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.  :Smile: 

Thats my 2 cents  :Smile: 

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## 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.

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## Isaiah

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

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## 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

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## upnix

 *Isaiah wrote:*   

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

 

Has anyone been able to load this page yet? I wouldn't mind reading this.

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## Isaiah

 *upnix wrote:*   

>  *Isaiah wrote:*   From what I read here , if you want decent 3D on a ATI card you have to buy drivers   
> 
> Has anyone been able to load this page yet? I wouldn't mind reading this.

 

PCLinuxOnline is back online now - they had some webhosting problems yesterday - w :Twisted Evil:  :Twisted Evil: f!

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## 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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## upnix

 *nalin wrote:*   

> my .02...
> 
> also I think the aformentioned article cleared up some of the ati is open, nvidia is closed arguments.
> 
> 

 

I'm not sure I'd put much stock in that article. I didn't see any references (I wasn't able to find anything on Google Groups either) and it seemed like it was written to rag on ATI than it was to "report" anything.

It was also written with awful spelling and grammar.

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## Isaiah

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

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## nalin

 *upnix wrote:*   

>  *nalin wrote:*   my .02...
> 
> also I think the aformentioned article cleared up some of the ati is open, nvidia is closed arguments.
> 
>  
> ...

 

Point taken...

here is a editorial and better (but similar) comparison of ati and nvidia approaches to linux.  The relevant stuff is under "binary drivers" though the entire article is good reading

here is the link to the ati press release, it is old and biased...kinda skips over any cons in the plan (link is broken in the article)

here (old ~2000)is criticism of nvidia's approach.  Summerizes the arguments of nvidia and the open source community rather well

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## Isaiah

 *nalin wrote:*   

> Point taken...
> 
> here is a editorial and better (but similar) comparison of ati and nvidia approaches to linux.  The relevant stuff is under "binary drivers" though the entire article is good reading
> 
> here is the link to the ati press release, it is old and biased...kinda skips over any cons in the plan (link is broken in the article)
> ...

 

This is the latest stuff I could find - here we have Michael Smith (Manager of Developer Relations) from ATI saying their unified driver will be upgraded soon to support XFree86 4.3 back on  April 21 of this year - looks to me like ATI is still lagging behind NVIDIA as far as driver support goes    :Question: 

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## 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  :Smile: 

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?

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## 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.

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## Isaiah

 *gregorybritt wrote:*   

> 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.

 Ahhh.. but those benchies are under that other OS  :Twisted Evil:   We need to see some numbers under our OS  :Very Happy: 

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## 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

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## 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.

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## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> 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?

 Q3, UT, RTCW and anything else that's popular and has both windows and Linux binaries, just Q3 and UT would be a good start though.

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