On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
As long as you've got nvidia, you should be fine. I've only heard mediocre things from ATi. It can be a bit tricky to get nvidia working if your distro upgrades kernels faster than they provide precompiled interfaces. On the other hand, their configuration tools are quickly approaching Window's click and point interface.
I disagree with your comments about ATI. I think they are solid, reliable cards and the r200 DRI driver that ships with X.org gives good quality 3D graphics. I have found that most people that have trouble with "getting these cards to work" really don't have clue one about how all the parts of the system interact together. I am not saying that this is a requirement for running Linux, but it might be for running certain distros. I can say that RedHat/Fedora will pretty much configure it for you out of the box.
You can get a pretty interface to tweak the DRI driver(s) here:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf
The worse problem with the ATI set of drivers is the slow support of new chipsets. All of the new cards shipping from ATI now are from a series of chips they call the r300 series. A r300 series driver is in the works and is fairly decent now, but still in heavy development. I expect to see it put out to the general public in the X release.
I can't say anything about ATI's closed source drivers. I try to stick with open source as much as I can for my systems.