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Thread ID: 42347	2004-02-08 09:56:00	Which Video Card(s) are best suited for Linux	Caesius (3758)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
213795	2004-02-08 09:56:00	I am looking to buy a video card for a new machine, this machine will be running Linux and possibly freeBSD, are their any GFX cards that perform better/have better support on Linux/UNIX? Cheers, Ben	Caesius (3758)
213796	2004-02-08 10:02:00	You simply cant beat nVidia cards. To be honest though, Ive not come across a card that WONT work in Linux. Simply use the generic 'vesa' driver... Ive run 512k graphics cards in Linux fine (The 10 year old trident ones). Ive also run some nice new 128MB nVidia cards too! Anything will work, whatever you can afford, go for it :-) Linux comes with drivers for almost everything so I wouldnt worry too much :-) nVidia cards perform best with the official drivers from nvidia.com though, and there's a lot of results out there, people reakon you can get a good boost frun running Linux (Dont ask me for a URL, I dont know of any, try google). Hope this helps Chill. BTW - I wouldnt have a clue about BSD sorry ;-)	Chilling_Silently (228)
213797	2004-02-08 10:59:00	What are you planning on doing with it? If you want to play games go with an nvidia. The open-source driver is 2D only, but their binary only drivers are well supported by the company. I think I saw some freebsd ones last time I looked. The ATI binary-only driver is currently a real _real_ pain to get working and use, but they do seem to be giving it more attention now. But the radeons do have the advantage of an opensource driver with 3D support which will work out-of-the-box for most recent distros, and should have better multi-platform support. The opensource driver is currently a lot slower than the ATI driver, a quick test with quake3 gave 35fps vs 140fps (the ATI driver will have quake3 specific optimisations so the gap for non-optimised apps will be smaller). And just incase you are looking at crappy integrated graphics implementations: VIA have recently released the source to a S3 savage driver that has full support, including 3D acceleration (if you can call it that). Expect the results to show up in a couple of months.	bmason (508)
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