Ok, I know this is a subjective question with subjective answers, but would anyone care to venture personal recommendations on good high performance video cards which work well and are relatively easy to get X up and running well on. Platform would be some flavor of debian with 2.6.10ish kernel. Bonus points for pci-express cards known to work well :)
-Dorn
If you want to be able to game (CS, NWN, UT, etc.) then get an nVidia card, flat out. The reason is that most modern games utilize S3 Texture Compression, which is patented. The binary drivers for nVidia are far and away better than the binary drivers for ATI. I should know, I struggled with the binary ATI drivers for over a year. When I finally bought an nVidia card, the binary drivers Just Worked(TM).
If gaming is NOT a concern, then buy an ATI card. If you want good 3D acceleration, then everything upto and including the 9200 is extremely well supported in the current XFree86 in Sid/Sarge. I have had the open source dri drivers give my up to 25% better performance than the binary ATI drivers.
Overall, the ATI card, if it is supported by XFree86, is easier to get working. But, if you want gaming performance, your only real choice is an nVidia.
-Roberto Sanchez
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