[Gllug] Graphics card advice

[Richard Cohen]

Yeah, I know it's a reasonably FAQ, but it's also one for which the
answer changes.

I intend to buy/build a machine over the weekend - the first new
desktop-type machine I've built in a while, since I've been using
either supplied machines, laptops or a Mac Mini for most of this
year...

There is a new major x.org release imminent (rc1 released this week,
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/X11R6970ReleasePlan says full release in
December)  and I'm quite happy to use a card which has new support in
that release - but I can't find a clear list anywhere of which cards
(chipsets, etc.) are actually newly supported.  I would like to use a
free driver, more because in my experience with the ATI driver, the
free driver seemed more stable and featureful, if slightly slower -
but I consider good xv or xrender support to be worth a few fps off in
3d games, for example.

I don't want to set it up as a games machine, but rather a decent
workstation - Athlon64, decent amounts of RAM and HD, DVD/RW and so on
- and I'm planning to plug it into a big screen, since I've got a good
price on the Dell 24inch panel, so I need some power on the graphics.

The first question is if PCIe is supported well enough on Linux to be
planning to use it in a new machine.  There does seem to be some
support, and it seems to be reasonably similar to PCI, so I don't
think it's much of a problem, but obviously the whole graphical stack
(i.e. kernel and X, both bus and device drivers) needs support...

The second question is what chipset and therefore card to aim at. 
I've never really done nvidia - don't particularly have anything
against them, just happened to have ended up with radeons instead -
and it does seem like the radeon driver in x.org is the most advanced,
both in terms of feature support and device support.

I can always be safe and just hunt down an AGP 9250 or something, but
that's boring.  Once I'm building a machine, and committed to spending
some real money, I might as well spend a bit more on the graphics and
get something a bit more current.  It's not that money is no object -
I'm not going to spend hundreds of pounds on a graphics card - but,
say, a 50 quid card compared with a 30 quid card could make quite a
bit of performance difference for a pretty low money difference.

Anyway, I've looked and asked around elsewhere, and not got very far,
so I thought I'd try the collective wisdom here.

Cheers
Richard
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