Hello, I am looking to buy a good graphics card somewhere in the 80ish dollar range that would work good with Slackware. Something that can run Team Fortress 2 good.

Can't go wrong with Nvidia...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127686

MSI GeForce GT 640 1GB DDR3 PCIe x16 (3.0) Overclocked edition
$79.99

That's the best I'd recommend in your price range due to how well Nvidia is supported on Linux.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have had a GTX 650 for a few months now, and NVIDIA is just now getting around to fixing some tearing problems that occur when watching video.

i would look at a ati 6850 or 6670..

sry.. with nvidia fans there must be a ati fan

Don't get me wrong, ATI/AMD is good, but they are seriously lacking in proper, if not adequate, support of their video cards.

Here's an offering I found for AMD, but have no idea if the Radeon R7 240 (Volcanic Islands) is supported in X.Org's free driver or the Proprietary FGLRX driver.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131516

Radeon R7 240 2GB DDR3 PCIe (3.0) x16
$79.99

That's the reason I mostly recommend Nvidia over AMD is driver support issues. Plus, Nvidia is the only OEM to supply drivers for *BSD and other UNIX-like and UNIX-based operating systems.

AMD sadly only supports Linux.

the r7 and r9 are to new! thats why i sayd hd 6850 or hd 6670..

by the way i had never problems with ati drivers not in windows and not in linux.. bsd i never tryd on a ati, just as a server with a 0815 card..

The R7/9 are currently not supported by the free driver, only by the latest version of the Catalyst/fglrx drivers. If you use a HD7000 series card you wilalso not have full support from the free drivers, yet. I use a HD6870 with the free drivers and am looking closely to their development. In the last year (after the backlash they received for deprecating somewhat new cards without delivering proper driver support) AMD has done a great amount of work on the free drivers, I mostly get 80-90% of the performance of the Catalyst drivers.

There are still some quirks, but AMD's drivers are in much better shape than a year ago, good enough for me to recommend AMD again.

I'm a fanboi of neither brand...

AMD do support the free driver, but don't forget that a rather important portion of the code comes in the form of a firmware blob... this does make you wonder why you should prefer it over fglrx (unless you don't have the option).

Despite Nvidia's proprietary *nix driver being well supported, they did kill the open source nv driver recently and have not helped or shown interest in the development of nouveau. Then there's the whole optimus thing...

My advice? Do some research and go for something which is supported. If you want to run games, then you should prefer Nvidia and the proprietary driver, because Nvidia cards have always been better when it comes to opengl - even when running under windows.

Warning - opinion based on (limited) experience only: AMD do seem to trump Nvidia in terms of image quality. Anti-aliasing is cleaner and sharper, with nvidia hardware it's somewhat fuzzier, blurry and textures just seem more washed out over all.

Nvidia is in the process of opening documentation to the nouveau developers. They are also actively working on enabling Optimus on Linux.

And on the downside, they have suddenly, silently, artificially limited Linux BaseMosaic to three screens, for "feature parity with Windows" and because "NVIDIA changed the basemosaic marketing specification to differentiate GeForce and Quadro cards."

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-match-windows
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...hree-screens-/

Don't retract your finger yet, Linus.

Yes I believe this may have more to do with steamos/'steambox' however...

every time I buy a new card weather it be Nvidia or AMD I see what my piggy bank can handle more bang for the buck . But do not bottle neck your computer with a card that is to much for your system.

I play way too many games on Linux and should feel ashamed but don't!)...so...If I were to buy a card TODAY for Steam and TF2, HL2, CS:Source, SS3:BFG etc, I'd go with the EVGA GTX 650 TI Boost 2GB or GTX 660 Ti (price drop on newegg.com!). Any mobo/cpu less than 2-3 yrs old will be adequate tp drive this GPU and you get a bit of "future proofing". Cards in the 610-640 number range are best for multimedia not gaming.

AMD/ATI? Sorry, IMHO, AMD has yet to take linux support seriously. We may gripe and quibble over Nvidia's binary blob, but it "just works."

Exactly. Nouveau is still developing, but it's being developed into a proper replacement for the xf86-video-nv driver. The NV driver was going nowhere at all. If anything it was nothing more than an over-glorified vesa driver with a proprietary extension to Nvidia hardware. Nothing more or less.

It's usefulness was nothing short of a workaround for servers needing a 2D driver for GUI interface support that the standard vesa driver often would mess up, or have hiccups with from time to time. The writing was on the wall for it for a while now that it was going to eventually need to be replaced.

Nvidia did nothing at all to stop Nouveau if you even kept track of the project. They were actually amazed someone actually could use LLVM/Clang and reverse-engineered hardware calls and API function calls to write a driver in a clean room from scratch and actually get 3D acceleration. Yeah, they did need a good butt kicking to get them to contribute to it's development, but development has happened, and Nvidia made the best choice possible and that was to support it.

And as I said, outside of Linux, there is very little support for video acceleration on non-Linux systems like Solaris and FreeBSD except for Nvidia. No other company has even been willing to support or release drivers for those systems.