Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

[Arc Riley]

Just a quick note - I work with OpenGL programming on GNU/Linux daily, and
11 test systems with various cards.

nVidia
>

The free software nvidia drivers are years off from having 3d acceleration
since the team working on it is having to reverse engineer everything.  If
you don't care about that, save on the card itself.  I highly advocating
boycotting nVidia products until they release the specs.


AMD/ATI Radeon


AMD has abandoned the proprietary ATI drivers.

A few months ago they released the specs to all their cards, the specs are
freely downloadable on their website.

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon

We have support for MOST Radeon cards with the stock Xorg/Mesa/DRI and Linux
kernel now.  There are some bugs here and there but they're getting cleaned
up very rapidly.  If you're looking for a decent 3d card I highly recommend
it.

Based on the DRI teams past work with the r200/r300 drivers, Radeon cards
outperform nVidia on DRI/Linux when matching the same two cards on Windows
yields the opposite, indicating the drivers as the major factor in this.


Intel purportedly provides full specs for their graphics chipsets,
> but the hardware itself is slow and feature-poor.


Ditto.  Drivers are great, but you'd be better off getting a 5 year old
Radeon 9250 for $25 than any Intel-based video card.
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