[Gllug] Graphics card recommendations wanted

[James Courtier-Dutton]

2009/6/29 Andrew Farnsworth <farnsaw at stonedoor.com>:
> On Mon Jun 29  8:06 , James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com> sent:
>
>>2009/6/28 John G Walker johngeoffreywalker at yahoo.co.uk>:
>>> It looks like I need a new graphics card. It has, obviously, to
>>> have good Linux support. Anyone have any strong recommendations? Or
>>> warnings?
>>>
>>I would avoid nvidia. They seem to be having financial problems at the moment.
>>But without nvidia, the only sensible option for consumer 3D stuff is amd/ati.
>>I used to prefer nvidia, because their drivers were less buggy that ati's.
>>AMD/ATI is more open source friendly than NVIDIA.
>
> This is a perfect example of a self fulfilling prophecy.  If you avoid it because
> they seem to be having financial difficulties... they will have further financial
> difficulties.  Even if Nvidia "goes down" I expect they will be purchased,
> probably / possibly by Intel.  Also, with the cost of video cards falling all the

But it depends on the reason for their financial problems. As far as I
know, it is due to a problem with their graphics chips that causes
them to fail, sometimes in less than 1 year.
A lot of equipment manufactures are therefore asking for a free
replacements to fix the problems, and this is costing nvidia too much.
Just google for "nvidia graphics chips fail" or something similar
should give you the details. Now, if nvidia does go down, they will
probably not release updated graphics drivers to match the newer linux
kernels, and thus at some point, the graphics driver will not function
on Linux due to it being binary only.
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