Don't be fooled by the amount of video memory on a low budget cards. Pay attention to the memory chips (you should have BGA, smaller square shape chips) and memory clock (it should be 600 for 9600Pro).

And that mention on the box will most probably direct you to the ati page to get the drivers for it, I doubt they have included fglrx with the card (if they did, it would be a first... To my knowledge, not even nVidia cards ship with Linux drivers out of the box)

That is what I said in my previous posts, but for some reason people can not read it right. Though BGA (ball grid array) just makes the chips smaller, uses less voltage thereby less heat dissipation, and less electromagnetic energy distortion in the data than TSOP chip packages.

DirectX is low quality. Use OpenGL because it has the highest quality and it should work in all games if they support it. Half-Life 2 should have support for OpenGL because Half-Life 1 does.

Microsoft does not have a real desktop OS for 64-bit processors yet. Linux is the only OS for 64-bit processors and some 32-bit Linux programs can be compiled to have 64-bit instructions with out any problems. The price to performance ratio is a lot better on a 64-bit processor than the 32-bit processors in games like the AMD Athlon 64. The AMD Athlon 64 3400+ out performs Intel's Extreme Edition processors. Also Xeon processor has a hard time beating AMD Athlon 64 3400+ even though the instructions were 32-bit.

It is common knowledge that ATI cards have crappy Linux drivers comparing to Nvidia products. I don't know if they include Linux drivers or not but I'm sure that it won't help a lot. Mentioning Linux support on the Box is pure marketing.