OT: recommend fast 2D card?

[volvoguy]

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 09:22:07 -0700, Daniel Stone
<daniel.stone at canonical.com> wrote:

> The ATI r2xx chipsets (8500->9200, with the 9100 being optimal, followed
> by the 8500, followed by the 9200, followed by the 9000) should be quite
> screamingly fast in 2D, however when you're dealing with 1.5MB images,
> it's always going to hurt.

That's great info Daniel. Thanks! I asked a similar question a while
back and was just directed to the known working hardware page on the
wiki - but it was specifics like this that I was looking for.

Would you happen to know WHY an older model card works better than a
newer one? I've been relatively pleased with the performance of my ATI
Radeon 7500, but the Nvidia TNT2 card with almost half the clock speed
and half the video RAM of my Radeon usually yields even better
performance yet than the Radeon.

I've been planning on upgrading to a Radeon 9600xt "All In Wonder"
card (realizing that the TV stuff may not work very well in Linux -
I'm still dual-booting). If this card's performance isn't any better
than a less expensive card, maybe it isn't such a good idea.

Does anyone else have first-hand experience with a variety of cards?
My goal is the best possible performance in both Linux AND Windows -
even if it means not buying the latest and greatest.

Of course I don't mean to distract from the original 2D performance
question - so don't consider this message a tangent. :-)

Aaron