I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard and a Powercolor HD 3850 video card. I have been unable to get a 3D driver to work with Debian Etch (using ATI's driver), Ubuntu 8.10, or Knoppix 6.0.1. In every case, loading the driver results in a blank screen. The same thing happened with Knoppix after removing the 3850 card.

I would really like to have a video card that plays nice with most modern distros, and will still provide decent performance for Windows games, if such a thing exists. I'm ready to sell the 3850 and get something else if anyone can recommend one.

I have an ATI Radeon 9550 card and am running Debian testing (squeeze). I haven't had any problems getting 3D accleration to work with that card using the ATI proprietary drivers downloaded from their website. If you want to give a last chance to your HD3850 card, I can try to talk (write) you through the installation process.
cheers,
jdk

Thanks for offering, but I really think I'd like to get something that requires less tweaking to work in Linux... I'll be putting more than one distro on this box. It would really be nice if it would work with a Knoppix live CD.

You might forgot to add your self to group that your distribution uses for graphics or video. Also check the logs for any error messages. You might also forgot a few lines in xorg.conf like a DRI section and the DRI module in the module section. Make a few modelines and adding them to the monitor section makes X11 more reliable. Sure selecting nVidia graphics card could be done, but you may have the same problems.

Could use Gentoo. Installing the fglrx driver seems easy because emerge does most of the work.

Could use radeonhd. It might be more reliable compared to fglrx.

Nvidia - I've used an older FX 5200 and less older 7800 GTX with Ubuntu dual-head for a while and works flawlessly (except tearing-titlebar sometimes when using gtk-window decorator with compiz on.) Didn't need any tweaking whatsoever. Just put it in, change boot-up, change driver, reload x-server, do setup using nVidia's gui utility.

ATI - Used X300 and FireGL something. No problem with single monitor setup on Ubuntu with ATI or open source driver with or without 3D. Dual-head suffers because of 2048 pixels limit of 3D textures if compiz is switched on. There are a few workarounds for that though. I listed my experiences here: http://www.rizwan-rafique.com/get-co...lder-ati-cards

Newer ATI cards should work flawlessly.

This applies to desktop distros like Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora. On others it's slightly trickier I think.

Debian Wiki ATI Proprietary install Directions - Directions look pretty straight forward..


I prefer nVidia cards (I know, I know, Chevy vs. Ford, vi vs emacs, ATI vs. nVidia) it's a personal prefernce really. I've found the nvidia cards work well in Linux and the drivers are not difficult to install and get working. so Pretty much any nVidia card would be my recommendation, if you truly decide to replace it.

Debian wiki Nvidia Graphics Drivers