There are those who would have you believe that Chris Gray wrote: > On my home box I run Windows 98 for games and Debian(Woody) for serious > (non-graphics-intensive) work. I want to upgrade my video card. I'm more > interested in something that will be straightforward to install on both > platforms and will give respectable performance for a while to come. I want > to avoid the situation I'm in now. I have a cheap S3 Savage4 based AGP card > for which there is no X server in the Debian packages. I can get X servers > elsewhere but on exit they crash my system. > > At the moment I'm leaning toward an ATI Fury. I'd be grateful for any > advice, opinions, or caveats. >
The most important single factor is going to be whether you're interested in a 3D card or not. If you are, the NVidia GeForce 2 cards are probably the best out there (although Voodoo fans will probably argue this point). The GeForce 2MX is the bargain version, but as far as price/performance goes you can't beat it at ~ $100. The GeForce 2GTS is the more expensive one, going for around $200. Be aware, though, that these require an AGP 2.0 motherboard. If you don't card about 3D, then the Millenium that was mentioned isn't a bad way to go if you can get your hands on one cheap, and the Millenium II comes in an AGP version. You can also get an NVidia TNT2-based card for under $50, and that has good 2D performance (AGP 4X, 16 MB, I think the RAMDACs are 300 Mhz). The TNT2 cards still have decent 3D performace, although you might find yourself limited to 800x600 or less in newer games and/or if you have a low-end CPU. The Matrox Millenium G400 are good if you primarily want a good 2D card but also want accelerated 3D. ATI's advantage seems to lie mostly in their hardware DVD/MPEG2 support. I really don't know if this is supported in their Linux drivers. The NVidia cards have a pretty good accelerated driver for XFree 4.0.1 that you can download from NVidia's website. For 3D on XFree 3.3.6, you might be better off with a Voodoo card, although IMHO you'll end up spending more for no overall gain in peformance. Enough rambling...
