Hi all,
Just to post a follow-up to this thread...
I plumped for the Radeon 9800 Pro, partly because it's a respectable card that was cheap, partly because a few people have given me good feedback on their experiences with ATI stuff, and almost entirely because about four people told me I couldn't.
On visiting ATI's website, I discovered the ATI drivers were 9-10 times the size of my average nvidia download - I gritted my teeth and pulled down almost 60 megs over dialup, steeling myself for one very long-awaited disappointment.
Twelve years later...
su, init 3, ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run, fglrxconfig, init 5...wait, what's this? I have 3d acceleration - and I didn't have to pull one hair out or shed one tear of despair...
The ATI drivers are more-or-less on a par with the nvidia drivers now for ease of installation - "more-or-less" because there's the fglrxconfig utility to run afterwards, an extra step.
ATI seem to have merged in FireGL stuff, and whilst I'm not nearly interested enough to delve into the technicalities of this, Doom 3 (yes, I finally bought the 'damned' game) and various other GL bits and bobs run, and run acceptably.
It's not a patch on the equivalent nvidia card in openGL terms of course, and I've got openGL 1.3 not 2.0, but it does the job and should be perfectly good for my forays into OpenGL development.
It also means I can run games with respectable levels of detail and performance if I wish to - especially doom 3 :D .
Stability is excellent - the driver is much more stable on this machine than the nvidia one was - probably to be expected since ATI's package has (they say) one of its feet firmly on the DRI ground of the open-source drivers.
2D performance is a world removed from my previous card (in a good way), although I've not really pushed the envelope with the whole Xcomposite/Xpendulousknackers/Xdamage thang yet.
Basically, it does the functional stuff well, and when I want to use my computer as a toy, it does that quite excellently.
It seems that whilst they don't approach the performance of the nvidia drivers, the new ATI drivers are a "far cry" (yuk yuk) from their previous incarnations, and thank heavens.
Anyway, just thought I'd bore you all with a follow-up, since people took the time to offer their advice on this.
Cheers, Ten.
...
Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.