An update on this...
I'm not sure whether it's because I'm deranged, but I've just forked out for a Radeon 9800 pro.
After the tip-off that these cards are viable for opengl dev, 3d acceleration can be done, 2d/video performance is good, and that doom3 seems at least runnable, I'm going for the power-to-price ratio of a radeon.
A potential problem was openGL games performance, but since I've found an nvidia 440mx to be absolutely fine with opengl under linux (performance in UT2k3 was stonking gorgeous), my thinking is that the 9800pro should be an improvement on that and I'll be happy.
This could be a sign of my masochistic streak coming through though - my subconscious geek seems to love picking 3-day hardware problems out for me.
Heh, haven't bought Doom 3 yet. I've got HL2, but I've broken my windows partition
Same here, on all 3 counts - I resized the partition sloppily at some point in the past.
Since it was a glorified x-box (install the game in windows, play it under wine) and I almost exclusively use $distro Linux, it's just sat there gathering dust..
..besides which, I really couldn't be bothered spending ages getting all the hardware working and installing software in windows, a situation familiar to anyone who uses any distro with apt and good hardware detection.
I've just revived it, however, in order to install a whole raft of valve's back catalogue, and ready to play hl2 on my new radeon.
Not a huge gamer, mostly need a sensible card for other stuff, but I must admit to glee at the possibility of being able to max out the settings on hl2 :)
If by "grown up", you mean "has working binary drivers that give reasonable performance", then yes.
There are more expensive manufacturers, with nice opensource drivers, but they'd be very out of proce range for most mere mortals.
Preference would have me using very nice hardware with only proper open source drivers - but realistically I don't demand open hardware platforms, so as long as the stuff *works*, I'm happy. For now :)
Budget/other component priorities were such that I happily endured HL2DM on a GF4 440MX for some time and would still be happy with it now if it were not physically kaput...
Anyway, I've decided to brave an ATI card. Here's hoping very sincerely that it turns out more useful than a bat on a lollipop stick.