the most powerful -free- gfx board

hi there,

i'd like to buy a new gfx card, but want to use free driver
free software..
i really dunno which one are free and which ones are using proprietary software drivers.
can anyone gimme an advice for buying a good, powerful video card that will use really free drivers?
i'd like to have a gfx card which is able to display quality divx, and lemme play games at decent speed.. as an indication of the type of gfx card i need..
and otherelse, if there's really absolutly no free drivers for fast and recent hardware,
what should i buy ? i'm searching powerful solution,yes, but kinda easy to install too..
with no problems that will requiere a linux-wizard level to make it working ;)
any experimented user can advice something?
tnx

Both Nvidia and ATI have drivers available for Linux for the cost of the download. That is, free.

Welcome to LQ.

Why not get an ATI card (i.e.9000 or 9200) and compile the 2.6.0 kernel that has the ATI drivers built in. Works like a charm on my Gentoo distro.

rberry88

Originally posted by XavierP Both Nvidia and ATI have drivers available for Linux for the cost of the download. That is, free. Welcome to LQ.

yea, thanks for your reply but i think you got me wrong, i meant:
Free as in Freedom.
you've never heard about: " free, as in free speech, not as in free beer" ?

You mean Open Source then. Reverse engineering 3D video card drivers is a lot more difficult than something like a NIC. I haven't ever seen 3rd party Open Source drivers for NVidia or ATI and both companies distribute closed-source drivers.

I still enjoy seeing the "driver taints kernel" message when I load the driver though. It feels so dirty