Best card for under $100

[Otus]

I'd buy an AMD Radeon 4000 series card or newer (but not the high end 69xx, though that's outside your budget).

If you don't care about Windows/DX11 and power consumption isn't a priority, 4000 series may be the safest bet as the drivers have had more time. They can also be found cheap either new or used.

Open drivers of either variety (G3D or not) in recent Ubuntu versions work for desktop effects.

[Panix]

I'll be following this thread closely in the next month. I'm hoping to get a $100 (or less - $80 -> $100) by end of Sept.

I notice a GTX 460 768mb for about $125 right now but I don't have the $$ just yet. I have read that Fglrx is still poor as far as AMD proprietary drivers go. I want optimal performance but also features for watching movies and that's still Nvidia territory isn't it?

I know Nvidia's open source drivers will always be lacking but if I want good video performance and best picture, then which card is good for $100 (price/performance)?

I thought maybe it's between (AMD) hd 5670 and (Nvidia) GTX 460?

My current card is a GeForce 7xxx series.

I think the OP's requirements are more or less the same as mine. I would like a card that is low temps/power but not sure there's many passive cards for that price and if they are, probably mostly AMD cards?

[xpander]

with that money u can get ati 5770 or nvidia 450 (which is pretty weak)
460 is pretty good..but power consumption is big compared to amd counterparts.
if u want wine gaming then go with nvidia for sure.

[Richard Wolf VI]

I've found the HD 5670 at a very reasonable price, even cheaper than the HD 4670, the former at just 75 bucks, the latter around 90. I'm seriously considering the HD5670 for my friend's PC, but I've read about some tearing issues when playing video. How bad are they? How can they be solved? Any other issues I should be aware?

On the comments about the HD 5770 and the GTX 460, these cards cost way over a hundred here, the former at 150 bucks and the latter over 200. As I said before, hardware tends to be more expensive here.

Wine gaming isn't a priority here, but given the bloom for GNU/Linux games from the Indie Bundle, we'd like to have a great experience with native games.

[gorky]

I've recently bought a 5750 and it works flawlessly with open drivers, I can even use the power management. I didn't try gaming under Linux, though. If it is too expensive there is always the 5670, which is noticeably slower but uses less energy as well.

[xpander]

i have no tearing with my 5770 when watching movies with vlc and tearfree is enabled from catalyst.
sry about the prices i mixed up the euro and dollars. 5770 costs around 100 euros and 460 costs 130 euros

[Elyotna]

I've been using an nvidia 9600GT for years and it always worked perfectly on my ubuntu/fedora. However I'd recommend the GeForce 430, simply because it supports recent OpenGL versions and can be used with full potential for video hardware decoding. With the nvidia blob you should never have any problem.

[crazycheese]

Got gtx260sp216 with 1.7gig gddr3 vram for 70$ used.
The only disadvantage is that driver is binary.

If you are not looking into any serious 3D and highbitrate video stream acceleration, your best choice would be amd with opensource driver and midrange card(like 5770).

[cbxbiker61]

Got gtx260sp216 with 1.7gig gddr3 vram for 70$ used.
The only disadvantage is that driver is binary.

If you are not looking into any serious 3D and highbitrate video stream acceleration, your best choice would be amd with opensource driver and midrange card(like 5770).

Nvidia proprietary driver is SOLID and supports GL 4.x. ATI proprietary driver is quirky. Open source ATI drivers are getting better all the time, but at a slow pace. I use the open source drivers on my notebooks, since I prefer AMD processors and you'll invariably get embedded ATI on those systems. Chromium's webgl doesn't work with ATI, so I can't play Angry Birds on my ATI graphics.

I've got Nvidia 430GT, GT460 and GT560Ti. The 430GT does fine with low-end games, but it's pretty laughable if you run Unigen Heaven benchmark on it. Popcap games under Wine work great on the 430GT.

Bottom line is, if you're going to do any gaming on Linux you should buy Nvidia. It just works with pretty much anything you throw at it. When opensource ATI graphics finally get caught up, I'll be happy to become a full-blown ATI supporter.

[crazycheese]

Nvidia proprietary driver is SOLID and supports GL 4.x. ATI proprietary driver is quirky. Open source ATI drivers are getting better all the time, but at a slow pace. I use the open source drivers on my notebooks, since I prefer AMD processors and you'll invariably get embedded ATI on those systems. Chromium's webgl doesn't work with ATI, so I can't play Angry Birds on my ATI graphics.

I've got Nvidia 430GT, GT460 and GT560Ti. The 430GT does fine with low-end games, but it's pretty laughable if you run Unigen Heaven benchmark on it. Popcap games under Wine work great on the 430GT.

I, pretty much, agree.

Bottom line is, if you're going to do any gaming on Linux you should buy Nvidia. It just works with pretty much anything you throw at it. When opensource ATI graphics finally get caught up, I'll be happy to become a full-blown ATI supporter.

I, pretty much, disagree. :P
Many games work on amd proprietary, some after tweaks. Some part work even on amd opensource. Almost all opengl2 opensource 3d games works with opensource amd too. Today with very decent framerates.
But, like you, I don´t like word "decent". The problem is, you pay for a card anyway, so you expect the driver.

Linux ain´t popular and its not gonna be more popular when windows is defacto preinstalled on 100% machines and both nvidia and amd polish windows drivers, advertise directx and so on. This is where they both suck. But they provide proprietary drivers with 80-95% speed, bug-less-ness and functionality for linux. The thing is - linux (and not only it) have proven the Linus´ words, that software is better free, and linux kernel prefers open-ness for a reason.
Nvidia fails here, miserablely(unless you count their other-than-driver projects). But its binary driver works, although it does have some quirks.
AMD fails here, but less. Still their open support is claimed to be based on their windows-to-linux ratio, which largely is result of their own actions. But they do more than nvidia in open field. And then they do binary driver too(which does less than nvidia).

So, if you buy discrete card, because you pay for card already, you either use nvidia to make use of the card features; or use amd to either go debugging opensource or use their binary driver and be ready for some troubles(which nullifies preferance based on openness, too). And we have Intel. Which does opensource bad and performance for gfx chips even worse. But they are really good at CPUs(killing Cyrix, suing AMD etc ).