Best video card for LINUX? ATI? Matrox? NVIDIA? mabye even *gasp* 3dfx?

[brian_riendeau]

With the release of Mandrake 8 I believe I will be ditching Windows for good. My only issue now is I have a Kyro 64MB video card with no availible Linux drivers. Anand's Linux video card is quite out of date so I do not want to put too much emphasis on the results from there.

What budget video card should I get? I am looking for something that work well overall and play Tribes 2 and Quake 3 at a decent speed AND get a regular stream of driver updates. Cards in my price range now are the Matrox G400/450, ATI Radeon 32MB DDR, GeForce MX 32MB, and anything made by 3dfx.

FYI my system is a Celeron 533@800 with 256MB of RAM.

 

[MadRat]

S3 Virge

Of course, I am only kidding!

 

[Shmorq]

I always read that nvidia chipsets have great support for Linux so I'd go with the GeForce MX.

 

[Soccerman]

AFAIK, nVIdia cards have driver support ONLY by nVidia, ie, their drivers aren't open sourced, like 3dfx's (who is now benefitting, becuase they aren't alive to continue developing them!).

3dfx cards DO have support, the question is, how good is it? I'd be willing to guess that their drivers aren't as good as nVidia's.

 

[MGMorden]

My Radeon works very well in Linux. The 2d drivers are in my eyes perfect and the 3d drivers work well, though I haven't benchmarked them. They are opensource though (latest versions always available at dri.sourceforge.net).

 

[Buddha Bart]

Nvidia is your only option for a card that will be able to perform at the level you want (tribes2 etc), and continue to be supported. However like someone mentioned, they're only in linux partially, they haven't open sourced even a bit of the drivers.
I don't trust radeon windows drivers, I see no reason they'll get linux any better.
A G450 doesn't have a prayer at handeling your games.

bart

 

[Elledan]

I'm about to buy another Voodoo III 2000/3000 for my Linux box since it's one of the better supported cards in Linux.

I would either go for a TNT2/Geforce or 3dfx solution.

 

[brian_riendeau]

Does NVIDIA have plans to maintain their Linux driver support or is a card with opensource drivers going to be better in the long run even if it is slower now? Or is NVIDIA's support already that good?

I have not followed the Linux community at all so bear with my newness here

 

[Syn]

Nvidia has great driver support in linux and they are updated pretty often.I run a CL Geforce2 GTS 32mb,Drake 7.2,XFree86 4.0.3 and the nvidia 0.9-769 drivers and it runs Q3 like a champ.If your on a budget a 32mb GTS can be had on the cheap or if you got the extra cash go for a 64mb pro version.

There is also a overclocking util for nvidia cards under linux,go to www.evil3d.net and look for nvclock.

IMHO if you want to game un linux and have great performance a nvidia card is the only real choice right now.

 

[p0ntif]

i've never had any problems with any of the voodoo cards under linux.

 

[Syn]

Yeah but how future proof is a voodoo card? Plus he wants to be able to play Tribes 2 and stuff man,think about it.