ATi radeon 9200 vs.Geforce fx 5700 LE

[Red*Fox]

I need some help determining witch video card will offer me the best Performance with my new dual core p4 system.
I have these two video cards in front of me and im having a hard decision on witch to use and im looking for some third-party opinions.
Heres links to the two video card specifications,

Radeon 9200

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeon9200/radeon9200/specs.html

Geforce Fx 5700 LE

http://www.pny.com/products/verto/discontinued/mainstream/5700le.asp (http://www.pny.com/products/verto/discontinued/mainstream/5700le.asp)

To me both of these cards are pretty equal due to them both having dual-integrated 400Mhz ramdac's

[stafio]

From personal experience, I would say don't bother with ATI. I can't comment on newer cards, but I have a 9200 myself and it's a complete pain. The drivers from the ATI site should work, but the trick is getting them installed first. It's possible, but it took a lot of trial and error when I did it...more on the error side. YMMV. There is the radeon driver (http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R6.7.0/doc/radeon.4.html) in xorg, which is decent, but you won't get the same configuration tools you would get by using the NVidia card.

I myself have an NVidia FX 5200. If you're using a Debian based distro, you can use Envy (http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html) to install the drivers. In theory you can install ATI drivers this way as well, but it always failed for me on the 9200. The NVidia drivers are good and they provide a nice configuration tool for changing settings.

[Leon]

I bought a cheap "Mad Dog" ATI 9250 AGP card for my Quad 2 Duo system. Libranet 3.0 installed a driver for it and it works just fine for my needs. Libranet 2.8.1 did not have a driver, but the generic VESA works well enough for me too. Trial installs of newer Linuces, e.g. Fedora 6/7 and SuSE 10.1, have also been happy with this card.

I installed Solaris 10 (8/07) x86 on the system. It installed a video driver that also works fine. This is a major improvement over earlier Solaris 10 releases, which seem to have an uncomfortable relation with XOrg. I might add that Solaris x86 running on a 1.8 gHz Core 2 Duo is very impressive; booting is fast, and everything starts instantly. Solaris is designed for multi-proc use, and it definitely shows.

[danieldk]

I have always recommended nVidia over ATI, because their installer actually works, and usually it is not too painful to set up. Though, times are changing. ATI was bought by AMD, and they are actively helping to move opensource 2D/3D drivers forward. Though, it may still take a while until these drivers are up to speed compared with their proprietary counterparts.