So, it'm about to buy a fresh videocard. Since I do most of my stuff on Linux, I wonder how well will either videocard perform. I recently had a good experience with GeForce 6600 with proprietary drivers and a less than satisfactory experience with Radeon 9000 a while ago. From my experience, proprietary drivers for GeForce used to work very well, while proprietary drivers for Radeon failed miserably. And opensource drivers were sloooow.

A few months ago I found out that ATI opened their specifications, and a work on fully featured opensource driver is in progress. I prefer to use free software whenever possible, with the exception of games, so, if that driver is fast enough, feature-rich enough and reliable enough I'd very much like to try it out. I wish I could say that if I can just to basic things, like watch video, heavily use compiz and work with simple applications, this may be enough. I do most of my gaming under Windows anyway. However, there is a good chance I'll go into indie game development in a few months fulltime, so it should also be able to run not-so-very-demanding games (say Nexuiz).

But if it isn't, I'd like to know, what to expect from proprietary drivers. Do recent proprietary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI work well? Are ATI drivers just as easy to install on Ubuntu as are NVIDIA drivers?