Preferred video card

[Charles Steinkuehler]

I have gotten my new 2.4 GHz Athlon system running RedHat, and even 
gotten the new NVidia graphics card (Asus V9280S Ti4200 based) working 
with the NVidia drivers.  I think it was also running in AGP mode (the 
NVidia /proc entries indicated it was running 8X AGP), but it still 
seemed pretty slow (based on dragging a large window around on the 
screen).  I am running RedHat 8 (X 4.2 and the default Gnome install). 
  I haven't yet tried KDE, but it's installed, so I can try it if necessary.

By "slow", I mean slower than a Win2K Athlon system (1.2 GHz) with an 
NVidia GX2 based VGA card for the same operation (dragging a window, 
with the window contents moving too, not just the window frame) in the 
same operating mode (1280 x 1024 x 24bit).

I'm considering getting different graphics card for the linux system 
(since it looks like getting a 2-user system running with the NVidia 
closed-source driver might be intractable), and putting this card into a 
windows system (for directX game-play), so I'm wondering which cards 
work "best" for linux.

"Best" for me means accelerated 2D performance (ie rapid window drawing 
and moving) at high resolution (true-color, 1280x1024 or 1600x1280), 
rather than 3D performance.  Since I'm thinking of trying to get a 
dual-user system running (involving an unknown amount of patching), I'd 
like a card with good open-source drivers, which should be available in 
both AGP and PCI versions (since it looks like I'm going to need two 
physical cards to do true dual-user...saddly, I don't think I can get a 
dual-head card to talk to two different X servers at once, although I'm 
still investigating).  I do have an older Rage 128 card (PCI), if that's 
a good choice, but I'm not against buying two entirely new cards.

Any suggestions or URL's for good info?

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net

P.S.  Is there an unambiguous way to tell if I'm talking to the card via 
AGP?  While I'm very familiar with low-level linux config for most 
things (SCSI, networking, RAID, etc), this is my first big forray into 
the linux desktop world, so I'm unfamililar with the whole video driver 
mess.