Best free software supported ATI graphics card.

[danscott]

Hi,

I'm looking for a graphics card upgrade. I don't have very complex requirements. The only things that I want are free software support, and dual DVI (or more) outputs.

I've always used Nvidia cards until now, because they had the best support. In the last year, ATI have started releasing specs and source code for their cards, so I'd like to know which of their cards are best supported.

According to Free3D (http://free3d.org/), the ATI Radeon X800/X850 chipsets would be good. Does anyone have any recommendations for cards which use this chipset and have dual DVI outputs? I don't want/need much power, so this chipset might be overkill - I'm only looking to spend a maximum of $100.

Thanks,

Dan

[Evil-I]

Hi There,

As the proud owner of an ATI Radeon HD4870X2 I'd honestly say buy Nvidia. The support for the ATI cards is still more than a little flakey if you want proper 3D support you're safer with Nvidia.

I've been fiddling trying to get proper drivers installed on my ATI card on my main desktop and although basic graphic drivers work fairly well, as soon as you want to utilise the gfx cards full features it all goes down hill. Its a crying shame really this ATI card I have is an absolute monster in Windows for gaming, I just can't get drivers working properly in Fedora

[danscott]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a shame that there are still so many problems. My current card is working OK - I'd just rather get rid of the proprietary Nvidia driver. I have some (very rare) occasional X issues and I'm pretty sure that they are caused by the Nvidia driver.

If ATI's no better, I'll probably just stick with what I have. Unless someone else can recommend a different card that they've not had problems with?

Dan

[Evil-I]

No problem

My last gfx card in my desktop was an Nvidia 8800GT, I had considerably less trouble with that than I'm having with this new ATI one. Not a huge problem really, as I only really play with fedora on this machine, my server is rock solid using FC10 on an integrated ATI Rage XL gfx chipset. Go figure.