ati x300 - good, bad or ugly?
 

I need to decide on a new PCIe graphics card. Since all of them are pretty expensive and all I need is decent 2D performance and a DVI connection. I did look around and all I found is either one of NVIDIAs TurboCache cards or an ATI x300 based board. I tend towards the ATI since it's full fledged and does not use any of my main memory. Both cost about the same.

I've always used NVIDIA boards and they have always worked very well, as one might expect.

The question that remains is: will the ATI work? I don't give a damn on the 3D performance, all I need is the DVI to work. Will the Open Source drivers suffice? Does anyone have experiences to share?

The system is an AMD64 running on a NFORCE4 board. Distribution is Fedora Core 3.

The good: ATI hardware is excellent

The bad: Catalyst is flaky, to put it politely

The ugly: ATI support STINKS as does their Linux policy.

I'm dumping Radeon cards for Nvidia as we upgrade. NVidia isn't perfect but at least they offer slightly more support for *nix.