my better judgement tells me this is a ridiculous question, having been raised with windows update i'm accustomed to drivers appearing specific to my hardware for download.
With yast2 in suse 9.1, I notice under add/remove software that an nvidia driver is listed. Now i've tried ati's linux driver and I ended up reinstalling suse as a result because it sucked. Will the nvidia driver work with my ati radeon 9200 card? If not, are there open source drivers for my video card that will allow direct 3d rendering rather than the default software emulation? Thanks in advance

Your judgement was correct, the NVidia drivers will definately not work. But there are indeed better drivers. Check out http://dri.sourceforge.net/ There you can get drivers to allow DRI and therefore true 3D. note that you will have to do quite a bit of reading, but it's definately possible, and definately worth it if you're like me and really want your ATI card to work (somewhat) properly.