What brand of GFX card is best for linux, ATI or Nvidia? Why? Thanks.

Nvidia. Nice drivers, easy to install and constantly updated. I've just noticed that you are using Suse. You can install it in a second using YOU.

Unfortunately, Nvidia drivers are not open source. Looks like nvidia only wants to sell their products to Linux users, ratter then supporting it. Not that I care much in this case though, their drivers are very good. Even my crappy Geforce 4 MX works nice with TV-out using their drivers

I would have to say Nvidia, I own a radeon 9800, and the drivers are a pain to install, and they do not perform as well as Nvidias drivers, When I had my GF4, drivers were not as much a head ache for me.

also, Nvidia has started supporting their next gen cards before ATI, if you look at the changelog of the last release you will se added support for the GF FX6800, whereas we are still waiting for X800 drivers from ATI.

lastly, neither companies have open source drivers, so its not like your supporting open source by buying from one company.

Yes it's too bad the Nvidia drivers aren't open source.
They work very well though, and are painless to install.
I'll go with Nvidia.

They 're not open source but you can open the sources Extract the source with :
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run -x

Then you can read the source code but you can't share easily your modifications (if any) because of the nvidia license

I have an ATI 9700 Pro and from reading the forums, ATI just doesn't make easy-to-install drivers. I, fortunately, got my drivers to install after doing some experimenting and research.

I'd like to continue getting ATI, but the driver support for Linux is not that well and I keep hearing better from Nvidia. The only problem with Nvidia's new card is that it takes up TWO slots and uses some special custom plug for the battery, I read. Maybe I'm wrong.

I concurr with the majority opinion.

nVidia is the way to go.

Look for a card that is at least a year old, that way the bugs (in terms of the drivers) are worked out and it won't cost you an arm and a leg.

nvidia is the easy choice. They work and you have a uniform driver - ie you can swap nvidia cards tnt2 to a gf4 and it just works...

The sources that you see are just the kernel interface source code, the graphics acceleration code is distributed in binary format.

The reason they dont share their source is because the drivers are just as closely guarded a secret as their chipset design. a good card can become crappy with crappy drivers, and visa-versa to some extent, so they dont want ATI stealing their openGL implementation and selling more cards cause of that.

just curious here.. how many of you that are wanting opensource drivers would make useful changes as you needed?

the information needs to be propritary... everything opensource is not good.. some things need to be kept closed.

besides if the linux community really need opensource hardware 3d accell.. some opensource linux zealot out there would make a linux compatable video card and release opensource drivers... i dont see that happeneing anytime soon though, it is expected that all companies follow the linux zelaot's ideals

by the way... NVIDIA all the way for linux... best drivers, and well documented support.

Chip fabs are very expensive and beyond the reach of any geek, so we can't make our own cards.

Homebrew drivers are available (see GATOS project for ATI) but it's very hard to code a driver when all the tech information about the card is top secret.

The actual facts seem to be poorly documented, but drivers for the nVidia cards don't seem to support virtual displays larger than 2048x1536. (Frankly, the easiest way to find out is to try it, then look at the X logs after the fact).

I can't find any documentation about ATI card limits ;-(

I'd really like a Samsung 241T, which has a physical resolution of 1920x1200, and I'd like to run it with a virtual resolution of at least 2400x1600 (or preferably 3072x1920). Would an ATI card (under either XFree86 or under XOrg) support these virtual resolutions? Such a combination is a bit expensive to purchase on just the hope that it would work...