I've done several forum and Google searches on this, and have yet to come up with anything very useful. All I know is I should stay away from ATI.

My system's specs:
3.2Ghz Pentium 4
1024MB DDR RAM
Intel 915 onboard graphics card
PCI-Express slot
Kubuntu Edgy 6.10

The card I have now works fairly well on everything except water effects (not at all), blur (Beryl gets very slow and choppy), video capture (captures less than 1 fps), and cube transparency (Beryl gets fairly slow and choppy). If possible, I'd like to get something that can handle all of these things well, as well as (hopefully) keep up with Beryl for a good amount of time. Also, component video out would be very nice, although from what I've seen so far, it seems unlikely I'll find one of those in my price range.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Even if you can't suggest a particular card, any specs that I should look for or any other information would still be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

I faced a similar situation till sometime back & I found this..

http://www.buy.com/prod/XFX_GeForce_...202138367.html
that time (2-3 weeks back) it had MIR, looks like its gone now. Anyways, at present installed this & running beryl at sweet fpses. (that time it had offer of 57.99 - 20 (Google checkout) - 10 MIR = 27.99 )

Since you are ready to shell out till 100, go for 7200 & above.
I would say, watch on dealsites for some nvidia cards & stay away from ATI for now - till they come up with composite extensions.

Cool, thanks a lot for the info. I forgot to mention in my specs that I have a PCI-express slot. I'm assuming this means I can't use a card that has an AGP interface? Sorry, I realize that's a stupid question, but I know literally nothing about video cards. Also, since the kind of RAM on my computer is DDR, I'm assuming cards with DDR2+ ram will just perform at DDR levels (since I'm guessing DDR is the highest my motherboard supports)?

yes you should look for PCI-E cards, not AGP, nevertheless, use the same approach..watch in deal sites - dealspl.us or fatwallet.com for some cool nvidia cards.
DDR2 on graphics cards & RAM on your system board are totally different & irrelevant in your matter. (The first is managed by the GPU, while RAM is managed by CPU.)
You just have to look for PCI-E cards - for compatibility sake.

Alright. Thanks a lot for all your help.