7.2. Current Status (1 March 2004)
nVidia's latest offering is the GeForce 5900, based on the NV35 chipset. It's well supported by Linux with high quality but proprietary drivers. nVidia uses a convenient combined driver architecture; their driver will support the TNT 2 all the way up to the GeForce 5900. Although their drivers are closed source, as a company, nVidia has been supportive and good to Linux users.
ATI's has worked with Linux developers for their Radeons up to and including the Radeon 9200, which have 2D and 3D support in XFree86. I'm not entirely sure of the quality of these open source drivers, however, Soldier of Fortune I and Heavy Metal still have opaque texture problems under first generation Radeons. Beyond the 9200, you need to use ATI's binary only proprietary drivers, available in rpm format from ATI's website. It's claimed that these drivers are piss poor; a friend of mine claims his GeForce 4400 outperforms his Radeon 9700 pro. That's shameful.
On paper, and in the Windows benchmarks, the Radeon 9800 trounces the ill-conceived GeForce 5800 and slightly edges out the GeForce 5900. On paper, it's simply the more impressive card. But again, the driver issue makes this information unusable for us. If you have your heart set to buy the best card for Linux, you'll want to go with the GeForce 5900.
7.2.1. SVGAlib Support
As of June 2002, SVGAlib support Radeon cards is shaky. Developers have reported that SVGAlib works on the Radeon 7500, Radeon QD (64MB DDR model) but has problems on the Radeon VE.
I have no information about SVGAlib and the GeForce cards.
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