I'm coming into the market for a new video card about mid-october (my ol' GeForce3 Ti200 is going strong but probably won't cut it for the new crop of DX9 games...).
I've been sticking with nVidia for a long time, for two reasons that actually don't have much to do with performance: first, their unified driver makes it easy to swap cards between computers (happens more often than I like)--minor benefit to be sure.
The second is that I really like nVidia's support for Linux, and while I don't do much gaming while using that OS, I do at least a little--so good support for Linux is very important for me.
While nVidia's drivers are a bit opaque, at least they can be compiled to support your kernel; on the ATI site, it looks like the drivers for new cards are binary-only, and I'm worried about them supporting a variety of kernels. I'm probably moving over to the Debian distribution (my RedHat8 distro finally descended into RPM dependency hell and I thought I'd try a system that relied on APT and see if it's any better), so I want to make sure that's supported as well.
So basically, long-winded intro to a simple question: in case ATI's technology lead extends to the next quick series of cards, how is Linux support for ATI cards? Anyone with actual experience? I'm curious not only about native Linux games/OpenGL support but also gaming through Transgaming's WineX library.
-->Stitch
I've been sticking with nVidia for a long time, for two reasons that actually don't have much to do with performance: first, their unified driver makes it easy to swap cards between computers (happens more often than I like)--minor benefit to be sure.
The second is that I really like nVidia's support for Linux, and while I don't do much gaming while using that OS, I do at least a little--so good support for Linux is very important for me.
While nVidia's drivers are a bit opaque, at least they can be compiled to support your kernel; on the ATI site, it looks like the drivers for new cards are binary-only, and I'm worried about them supporting a variety of kernels. I'm probably moving over to the Debian distribution (my RedHat8 distro finally descended into RPM dependency hell and I thought I'd try a system that relied on APT and see if it's any better), so I want to make sure that's supported as well.
So basically, long-winded intro to a simple question: in case ATI's technology lead extends to the next quick series of cards, how is Linux support for ATI cards? Anyone with actual experience? I'm curious not only about native Linux games/OpenGL support but also gaming through Transgaming's WineX library.
-->Stitch