I am planing on building myself a new computer and was hoping to use it for games on windows and to be Vista ready, also I plan on installing Debian on it too. I was wondering which video card will better fit my needs, a ATi X800 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102572 or a Nvidia 6600GT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814122201

Thank you for any help.

nvidia has the most mature linux drivers, so that's the bet with linux at the moment.

As for XP SP3, well the nvidia windows drivers are good as well.

Concur with amosf. It's also my understanding that it's easiest to install the nvidia driver under linux as well - Sure I appreciate that you can get the ATi ones to work fine as well, but reading here and at some other forums as well, it does seem that it's easier to get the nvidia ones up and running (it must be, 'cos even an idiot like me can manage it ! )

regards

John

I'm must agree with the above poster's. I've had one heck of a time trying to get ATI acceleration to work w/o trouble. It was to much hassle so I switched to Nvidia and man oh man was it a treat to finally get some of my games working with Cedega.



PeaCe V

It will also help if you search on the forum for threads similar to yours. This question gets asked a lot and you will benefit from the opinions expressesd in past threads.

nvidia. I think I'll put that in my signature.

What sort of games are you looking to play on it? Do you want it to be future-compatible? 6600GTs are pretty mid-to-low range these days (I know, I have one). It's lower than the min requirement for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Quake 4 is very playable but it does struggle at times, something I didn't want to see

If you are looking to play some recent and unreleased games on it I'd start looking at a 6800Pro or maybe a low range 7 series card, that is if you can afford it. However if you are just looking at playing games like ET or not games that are fresh out of the dev shops then a 6600GT should be more than enough, I found ET and CS (and Source) to be more than playable on my old FX5200.

I think Ati is best if you talk about old videocards, because the opensource drivers for all ati's under radeon 9200 are pretty good.

Asides from that for newer cards nvidia is probably better with linux drivers.

Although I had no problems installing the ati drivers on arch linux where it's almost automaticly done