Graphics card recommendation?

[Joonas Sarajärvi]

2009/6/2 Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>:
> Joonas Sarajärvi wrote:
>> There are cheap models in both Nvidia's and AMD/Ati's product ranges.
>
> But don't buy NVidia! Proprietary drivers only cause problems.
>
>>> 3. Works under Fedora-10, if possible as is.
>> I'd go with a AMD/Ati card due to AMD's effort to bring quality open
>> source drivers to the community. Currently new RadeonHD cards will
>> work quite nicely,
>
> Not really, because as you say...
>
>> but especially on Fedora 10 there is little hardware acceleration offered.
>
> ... so why are you recommending them? There's in fact no OpenGL support for
> Radeon HD cards yet in the drivers shipped with Fedora and there's no
> definite time frame when it'll be available. (The DRI upstream project
> claims an ETA of H1/2009 for first working snapshots, but said first half
> is almost over and I have yet to see anything usable.)
>
> In addition, most Radeon HD cards are expensive, he's asking for something
> cheap.
>
> The right choice is to pick one of the older ATI models (up to X1950), see:
> http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon
> All except the r100 (Radeon 7000/VE) series have texturing, clipping and
> lighting (TCL) support.
>
> Also note that the cited Asus K8V-MX motherboard has an AGP port and no
> PCI-Express ports, so the right choice is an AGP card, not a PCI-Express
> card.
>
> A Radeon 9250 might end up being the best choice, it's not the most powerful
> graphics card out there, but it's cheap, it does have a TCL engine and 3D
> acceleration just works.
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>

I recommended new AMD/Ati graphics cards, because their open source
drivers are very likely to have OpenGL support equal to the older
Radeons, and in the meantime, there's the option of using the
proprietary driver.

A R500 generation Radeon would also suffice for the OP's needs, but at
least here they are quite hard to find. Newer cards are usually also
either faster or less watt hungry.

A used R500 generation card certainly would be a strong contender
here, especially since the OP is looking for an AGP card.

-- 
Joonas Sarajärvi
muepsj at gmail.com