Which video cards

Are there right now ANY GPLed drivers from some video card manufactures? I think ATis and Nvidias are not? And what video cards are better for Linux? Nvidia?

I don't think there are any GPL drivers for decent 3D support anywhere. My experience showed that NVidia cards are easier to set up than ATi, but your mileage may vary.

Some open-source drivers are available for some cards, though they are older ones, for which I don't know if they could even startup SL, but you could give them a try: Hardware 3d accelleration is supported for some ATI radeon (and other manufacturers, excluding nvidia which does not help much by not publishing the specs of its cards) mentioned in the DRI wiki

None. You want games class hardware 3D your running closed source drivers.

Ninjafoo is correct and this will always be the case. The reason they are closed source is because the drivers contain paintented stuff that they have licenced, therefore there is no way nVidia could ever open source them. I imagine the same is true for ATI.

nVidia do contribute code to the open source 2D drivers for their cards, so it's not like they are anti-OSS or anything.

Well, until the patents expire

But yeah, you're gonna have to run a "tainted kernel". Hey, it looks like lsmod doesn't show that whole "Tainted: P" thing any more... it was silly anyway.

Anyway, Nvidia has traditionally had much better Linux driver support than ATI. Which is unfortunate, since ATI makes much better cards, IMO.

The time those patents have expired, nobody will use this technique anymore, because it's outdated

I always buy Nvidia, simply because of the high quality Windows and Linux drivers. ATI may make a better card, but its a tad pointless if the drivers let you down.

NVidia. It started out like that, with the TNT series, and I have just stuck with it. At the moment I am using an FX 5200, as the memory is OK (128 MB), and for my requirements it works. I will probably upgrade my system piecemeal, starting with CPU (or Graphic card? No idea yet!).

And I think its a matter of debate, whether NVidia or ATI does better cards, electronically. Every time one or the other brings out a new card, the emags are FULL of comparisons, and for some things NVidia is absolute tops, and vice versa! Great, I say, this is Real Competition

I do have the impression that NVidia's Linux support is better, even though the specs that open source would LOVE to have are not available. The fact that they do have a fairly current driver binary for Linux is not nothing.

In fact I have the same card.

Vinci