My old graphics card recently died and I am now looking into getting an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, but I have not seen a lot of info about how well supported it is under Linux. ATI does have some Linux drivers available (recently updated) but how well does it compare to support of NVidia cards? I saw somewhere that WineX does not run as well with ATI cards and that support is not as good in general. Even though the 9800 is a good piece of hardware, is it still wiser to get a comparable card from NVidia just for its Linux support? I am not totally against dual booting, but it is a pain.

I've always had better luck with nvida. but There are some things you should know. if you are installing under fedora you must remove the XFree86-Mesa-libGl or openGL will not work. this is incomparison to never being able to make an ATI work with openGL see comand
rpm -e --nodeps XFree86-Mesa-libGL
also you have to do an export CC=gcc32 before you have the driver compiled ( the install compiles the driver for you)
and you must install the kernel source (you sould always do this anyways)
I run wineX 3.2.1 and Half life/ Warcraft III and Red Alert 2 with no problems

system is a nforce 2 board with an AMD 2500xp 512 DDR 400 ram Nvidia FX 5200 128 card.
Fedora core 1 see earler post about prelinker and you are set.

Willaim S. Huseky
Network Engineer
SAIC
"there are 10 types of people in this world. They who understand binary and they how do not"

nvidia does have better linux support for their video cards for sure, but I set my 9800 Pro up with no problems. glxgears runs at 8000 fps now, quake3 runs 1600x1200x32 at 121.9 fps (slow I know, but it runs at that speed in windows too for some reason... I gotta figure out why still).

<A HREF="http://www.members.shaw.ca/gskamps/w00tness.jpg" target="_new">And here's a shot of my card running halflife under wine</A>

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.