best video card for use with open source drivers?

[tomhorsley at adelphia.net]

> Since I may have to replace a video card anyway, I'm curious about
> people's experiences with the ATI cards. Is it worth the switch?

On i386, the radeon open source driver is good enough to run things
like neverputt, but the fglrx driver is clearly higher performance. Unfortunately
the fglrx driver is almost always broken (seems that way lately anyway), so
the fact that it has better performance is moot.

On x86_64, I have never yet seen DRI working correctly in the open source
radeon driver, so basically there is no ATI 3D on x86_64. The fglrx driver
worked for a while, but the most recent ones hard hang the system whenever
I exit the X server, so that's not much funn.

What we really need is for google to take some of those billions they have
supporting open source and invest them in a new video hardware product
that will always have nothing but opensource drivers. Then all the linux
users could buy the GoogleVideo cards and forget ATI and Nvidia :-).