Best card for under $100

[Richard Wolf VI]

Which 2500 second gen (sandybridge) i5 was bought?
2500?
2500S?
2500T?
2500K?

It's a plain 2500 which uses HD Graphics 2000.

I can only speak for the 2500K i5 which has Intel® HD Graphics 3000 (While all the others have Intel® HD Graphics 2000) in saying that graphics performance here is fine using the current stable Fedora release fully updated. No issues to speak of.
You can save yourself the cost of buying a card if you switch to Fedora or (I would hope,) use a Ubuntu daily until the next Ubuntu release.

We have tried Fedora, but it couldn't detect the monitor resolution and the GNOME 3 experience is seriously lacking.

IMO you won't get much more than a little if any better performance than HD Graphics 3000 with a cheap add in card.

Although I know the HD Graphics 3000 are formidable, the 2000 are simply inferior, any of the cards I listed outperform them greatly.

If you really must use Ubuntu as is before they release anything as stable which works with second gen i5 processors, without going for one of their development CDs, then an AMD HD card is the right choice. The higher the number the better. I would avoid second hand unless the price is extremely reasonable and the source is reliable.
ATI\AMD make the most powerful graphics cards in the world. And have done consistently for as long as I can remember.

Yeah, benchmarks on AMD cards are very positive, I'm a bit worried about driver support in the future, though.

I have had problems with cheap Nvidia cards. Especially using Linux.

Except for KMS, we haven't, in my friend's old PC. Granted, those were old cards (GeForece 5200 and 6200).

[Richard Wolf VI]

I only read about Gnome 3 problems with some of the newer nv drivers, but i have got no bad reports from Kanotix users with KDE 4.4.5 and Xserver 1.7.7 - as you can test live with gfx on option already.

Does Compiz work with these configurations?

I mainly use a low power nv card, preferred passively cooled or at least with low noise cooling. 100$ is basically a price point where you dont get interesting cards. If you dont have got an onboard solution and you dont want to play games then a passive g210 would be enough,

He does want to play games, as I stated originally...

if you intend to play games with full hd res later maybe save your money,

... and also stated at which resolution to play them...

every card you get for 100$ you would need to replace anyway when you want to do that with current (non Linux) games or Unigine Heaven benchmark with tesselation and everything enabled. Those cards begin with gtx 460, maybe try to get this 2nd hand.

... and also stated it was for light gaming.

I dont have got this card on my own, but i know some how do. My fastest dx11 card is an ati hd 5670, but i would only use ati in a 2nd or 3rd system. At least in no system mainly used for watching movies.

Is it because of tearing?

Btw. if your only tft is 1280x1024 i would definitely replace it with a new full hd tft with hdmi, looks much better...

If we had the money to buy that monitor, we'd have already bought a 460 :P

[Luke_Wolf]

Radeon 5670 should be fine for anything in terms of what you're going to do in regards to gaming, particularly at those resolutions, or to put it another way a Radeon HD 5670 is capable of running Crysis on a mix of High and Gamer Settings at 1080p, at least under Windows 7 from what I've seen.

And Those that think Tessellation requires more GPU power... You're wrong, Tessellation actually cuts down on use, it just got a bad wrap because Dirt 3 went and used it to render an entire crowd of individual people, without those doing the benchmarks realizing what was actually going on, and so now Dx11 has this aura of requiring more powerful cards when it actually doesn't require as powerful cards as previous generations of such technology.

[Kano]

Well with DNF which definitely does not use the latest engine it was sometimes a bit slow even at 1280x1024 with everything set to max settings. I dont like Crysis, but the engine is pretty old too now.

[Luke_Wolf]

Well with DNF which definitely does not use the latest engine it was sometimes a bit slow even at 1280x1024 with everything set to max settings. I dont like Crysis, but the engine is pretty old too now.

Crysis may be "old" having come out in 2007, but the Crytek 2 engine itself is still very much relevant by today's standards, much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s Xray engine, though GSC is supposed to be using a new engine for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, course Xray now is kind of like Darkplaces, in that it's vastly changed from where it started..

[Richard Wolf VI]

Guys, I was talking about GNU/Linux here.

[Luke_Wolf]

Yes but windows benchmarks are required to give a clear idea of how powerful a card is for now (we don't really have a crysis equivalent unless one wants to consider Uniengine benchmarks), however given we are talking light gaming in such a manner as Quake 4, The Radeon HD 5670 should be more than powerful enough for his needs on the open source driver, just be sure to set the profile that the card is running at appropriately. Long term the Open Source drivers are going to have a better video setup than the proprietary drivers, simply because they and the people implementing the standards can meet in the middle, and going Radeon is going to get you there faster.

[Richard Wolf VI]

Yes but windows benchmarks are required to give a clear idea of how powerful a card is for now (we don't really have a crysis equivalent unless one wants to consider Uniengine benchmarks), however given we are talking light gaming in such a manner as Quake 4, The Radeon HD 5670 should be more than powerful enough for his needs on the open source driver, just be sure to set the profile that the card is running at appropriately. Long term the Open Source drivers are going to have a better video setup than the proprietary drivers, simply because they and the people implementing the standards can meet in the middle, and going Radeon is going to get you there faster.

I understand our point, but it also seems that it shifts from the original scope of having a card that works without issues in Ubuntu.

[Luke_Wolf]

I understand our point, but it also seems that it shifts from the original scope of having a card that works without issues in Ubuntu.

The problem with that is there isn't a perfect card with a perfect driver, though the Gallium architecture will in the future be close. The question is more a matter of what are the Tolerable issues?

People will say the Nvidia drivers are the end all, be all but no they're not, Nvidia has had at least 2 (though I've heard it's 3) instances of card killing drivers, and I've had various programs tear, and the console isn't framebuffered (remediable by compiling the vesafb module), however native and wine games work well with it, and of course vdpau is widely supported, using Nouveau at this point is not worth considering IMO for this build, on top of which Nvidia tends to run hotter and draw more power.

As far as ATI/AMD goes, the catalyst drivers are okay but not wonderful, the drivers work well enough with native games, although there are some problems with wine games with complete diagonal tearing, also no real video acceleration because nobody has implemented their pathways, and again no frame buffer console (again remediable by vesafb). The Radeon driver is generally good, but it runs at half the speed of the Catalyst driver (doesn't matter for you), doesn't have S3TC enabled by default (can matter), power management is not set up as automatic out of the box (easily remediable) and so the card will run full burn all the time unless you tell it otherwise, and of course is still running at OpenGL 2.1 with large parts of 3.0 (which doesn't matter for you), however it does provide a framebuffered console and plenty enough speed for your purposes, Native games work for the most part but I haven't personally actually taken the time to try out wine stuff under Radeon, though supposedly outside of the S3TC issues it should work, You can have video acceleration with Radeon as provided by the vdpau state tracker, although you need a new enough version of the drivers for that.

So The question to you is this: What do you want to deal with?

[xpander]

AMD(catalyst drivers)
+best bang for buck
+works good with native games
+doesnt take much power unless u want 58xx or 69xx cards

-can have troubles with wine games
-no widely supported video accleration

Nvidia (prop drivers)
+works good with native games
+works fairly well with wine games
+has support for video accleration

-costs more than AMD for same bang
-using more power from ur system (cheaper cards doesnt)


opensource drivers are no go for the moment imo.