I have long supported ATI for their willingness for open sourcing some of their code.

However, lately I would not recommend ATI at all.

I bought a brand new computer about 8 months ago. A decent dual 64bit core for home use. Probably a clearance model. It had an RS740 Radeon 2100 Integrated Video Card.

Support for the open radeon driver was still in testing, so I was forced to used the proprietary drivers. Less than eight months later, ATI has already pulled the plug on this card. The last catalyst it can use is 9-3.

Okay fine, its not a high end card, I could live with a legacy driver. Here's the kicker though. There is no support for 2.6.29+ kernels. Linux users are already testing 2.6.31. I might as well forget about Xorg 1.6 too.

While the opensource developers have done extensive work (thanks guys!) on both the radeon and radeonhd drivers, they are not ready yet for stable, decent performance general everyday use for this card.

Don't feel to bad.. They pulled the plug for the windows drivers too. Don't expect to use this card either for windows 7.

These cards have also been dropped.

Radeon 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, and 9800 Series
Radeon Xpress, X300, X550, X600, X700, X800, X850, X1050, X1200, X1250 X1300, X1550, X1600, X1650, X1800, X1900

I'd put my AGP Radeon 8500 in my new computer... but its new enough not to have any AGP ports...but too old to be supported ATI.

Also, is it too much to ask for basic mpeg2 acceleration!? No support for XvMC and XvBA on these cards. Nvidia has been rolling out xvmc for years.

Nvidia albeit a bit more closed-sourced, has been changing it ways. A really nice bit of code they open sourced is CUDA, and there are more bits of codes that have been promised to become open source.

Nvidia drivers just work with few complaints.

Sorry ATI, but you have become lazy, and frankly just don't care.

I now recommend Nvidia regardless.

Gary

Maybe. AMD/ATI has, of course, every chance to catch up again. And we may see a more open race in a year or so, when ATI drivers are equivalent in quality to what the contender offers for Linux, AND open source'd.

But for the moment being, NVIDIA is the better bet, if you want avoid trouble and if you have other hobbies and as long as it is summer...

gargamel

Due to recent FORTUNATE circumstances, I have done major upgrades to my main box.
When SW13-64 comes out, I'll be installing that on that box, and updating my sticky with my experience.

Luckily (Well, not really...lol) it has an onboard Nvidia 6150 chip, and a 8400GS PCI-x16 board too.

I chose the Nvidia boards because of their ease of install, passing by the Ati options because of this.

I do really hate to say it, because Ati has wonderful video cards. But their incredibly difficult installs makes me not want to use them.

I've run slack on a number of laptops and desktops and have had some experience with all of intel, nvidia and ati/amd cards.

I've got them all to work acceptably, though ati and intel definitely took more tweaking than nvidia.

I've had little luck on getting google earth to work smoothly with intel 945GME and things seem to be getting worse with the most recent drivers. I got it working easily enough with ati/amd graphics chipsets, but once had to downgrade a fglrx driver to get it work properly. Google earth worked first time, each time with my two nvidia carded machines.

So, echoing the experience of others on this thread: if you're happy to use proprietary drivers, then nvidia is the easiest choice.