ATI Video Cards and Linux: The 3d Experience

In my experience, most users of computers inherit their computer from a friend or simply buy a fully assembled computer.

But, as you might suppose, not all computers are made the same. For example, many of today's games and computer interfaces require higher and higher quality video cards. The video cards in pre-assembled computers are frequently not powerful enough to do much gaming with.

What type of video cards are out there? As with computers overall, there are many different types of video cards. But the two primary makers of video cards are ATI and Nvidia.

Also, most computer users choose Windows for their operating system (OS). For many reasons discussed in a wide array of other articles I've written, I choose Linux whenever possible as my OS rather than Windows. Although many reasons can be listed for this choice, I choose Linux because of it's stability as an OS and because Windows, unlike Linux, is constantly bombarded by various computer viruses and worms and spywares.

Traditonally most Linux users, when using higher power video cards, have used Nvidia cards. This has typically been due to the fact that Nvidia drivers were more accessible than ATI drivers for Linux computers.

Now to the heart of the matter: I have ATI video cards. I have a few of them, actually. The question then became: how to use ATI video cards with my preferred OS, Linux?

I'm happy to say that ATI has heard the cry coming up from the ranks of Linux video card users and has begun to come around. Available today are various "ATI Driver Installers" that can be found at ATI's home page.

With this in mind, I began trying to find the easiest distribution, or type, of Linux to use for my ATI cards. I began with Ubuntu Linux, a very stable distribution. Ubuntu is one of the most popular types of Linux on the market today. It has a great appearance and I've used it successfully with ATI cards in the past.