Alright nerds, I need your video card recommendations...

I'm going to be building myself a new computer soon and I'm wondering what kind of video card I should go for. My current computer has an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro that has served me well, so I was considering going for another Radeon, and the motherboard I'm getting uses the new CrossFire whatnots that the new Radeon cards feature. What should I do? Is the CrossFire stuff worth a damn?

8800GT is my next card.

BFG 8800GT OC 512MB. I would highly recommend it.

$139 after rebate. Not bad.

$199 at newegg and beats the snot out of an 8800GT. It isn't even close. Kinda sad actually.


Plus Bluray and HD playback is sweeeeeet

The 4850 beats the 9800GTX most of the time and the 4870 should beat the dual-GPU 9800 X2

I'll look into that as well.

ATI + Crossfire is the fucking LORD OF THE LAND. Seriously, it'll pound the dirt out of NVidia. There's just one problem: for some reason 10% of video game makers seem to think making their games work on ATI cards is not for them, so for some games you end up having to go through an ordeal configuring the games, turning off this shader, that rasterizing option etc etc etc.

Soooo, if you can deal with the persnickety 10%, get ATI. Otherwise if you never want to have to deal at all with drivers and configuration, get Nvidia.

The geniuses *finally* decided to do something intelligent and start shipping Linux drivers with the driver disc with this card ... not that you need them, but it's an issue with me.

I gave up on ATI a few years back because of their crappy drivers and horrid support of Linux. Nvidia has been (and still is) much better in this regard.

I like my current 8800GT quite a lot and would have no problem at all recommending it. In fact, I would if not for the move by AMD/ATI to improve Open Source support.

I've heard a lot of people complain about ATI's shitty track record with drivers but I've never had a problem with my Radeon.

...most of the time. The problems I did have were application specific, usually involving games. If you played any of the Sims games (Sims, SimCity, etc.) the performance was horrible. I didn't notice it so much until I got an Nvidia card on the same machine, then played the games. Dramatic.

OnEdit: The Linux driver was absolute garbage. I had a 9600XT AIW, which I had purchased specifically for the video capture feature. Wouldn't work with the ATI official drivers. I had to compile and configure from source a third-party app that eventually, kinda worked, but not really. At the time ATI was sharing nothing about its hardware specifications that would have aided third parties developing drivers for platforms other than Windows.

in terms of quality drivers, amongst other factors.

An nVidia 8800GT-based card will be a screamer, and rather less expensive than the new 9800GTS...