Hello, people,

I am wondering which graphics card to buy.
Maybe you will be willing to share your experience.

I am using Debian etch.

My requirements:

It will not be used for games, so 3D acceleration
is not very important.

On the oher hand movies ARE important, so if there
are cards which do better job for playing movies
i would go for them.

I need 2048*1536@85 H supported.

Also I need the dual monitor display
so the card should support this;
the second one will be a flat screen about 1920*1200
and I would like to get the max. resolution
possible.

The max budget is about 250$ but would be great to pay less )

Any advice?

Many thanks

Stefan

A complete list of native (no extra driver install reqd.) cards can be found here

I would advise you to get an nvidia based card. Nvidia provides very good Linux drivers and they are quite easy to install.

I only know about Nvidia cards, but I can tell you the Xorg nv driver doesn't support any 3D acceleration but does support 2D so movie playing would be smooth. You could also use libXvMCNVIDIA (part of the nvidia driver) to have your card assist the CPU in decoding MPEG2 video which is generally necessary for high definition media.

You could get away with something like a Geforce 4 series card for this which won't cost much at all. A high-end 4 series (not MX) will usually outperform a 5 series MX card for similar price