i have never had any problems with ati, oh except one, waiting months on end for x1600 support but apart from that the only problem with their linux package is the lack of a decent control center, i mean the one that have now is utter rubbish, i would love to see a port of catalyst to gtk2

Thermodynamic - Please post back with your findings once you've had a chance to play with the ATI card. I'd definitely be interested in what your experiences are with respect to the current (eg, mid-2006) state of ATI's Linux support. Thanks

NVidia for the win! NVidia has put much more effort into producing a good Linux driver than ATi has, and although the situation is getting slightly better on ATi's side, the ball is in NVidia's court when it comes to 3d accelerated graphics support and Linux.

I have never had a GUI-related problem with Linux on computers with NVidia GPUs. However, I usually have to do at least some minor tweaking to get even the most newbie-friendly distros to work with my ATi card properly (an X700XL) - even Ubuntu.

I'd say that NVidia wins this by quite a long way at the moment.. Here's to hoping that ATi will produce as good Linux drivers as NVidia in the future

Cheers,

-jk

I do not play games - so I don't really know which one has better hardware. Some gamers swear by ATI and others by Nvidia, so it strikes me that there will actually be very little difference.

As for installing the drivers, some distros such as Fedora and Ubuntu have packages available for install using yum or apt-get respectively. This makes it painless to install the drivers for both ATI and Nvidia - just a simple "yum install" or "apt-get install" restart X and your done.

--Ian

At the moment, ATi seems to have the upper hand with their X1900XTX - but that could change soon. I swear by NVidia not because they have better hardware, but because they produce excellent GPUs for a pretty good price (most of the time), and their Linux driver is more advanced. My NVidia 7900GT does well perfectly rendering some of the toughest games (on Windows), so even though it may not be the best card out there, it is very good and does its job better than I need it to.
Yes, but it isn't always that easy. Some ATi cards can be a real pain to set up, whether your distro provides a native package for the driver or not. NVidia's driver tends to be much easier to set up, and will usually require less tweaking later on (or none at all) in comparison to the ATi one. But that's just my take on the experience with both - what you think of both drivers or manufacturers is your opinion, and I'm not going to try to change it