Choosing a Video Card for Gaming
Because 3D games place extraordinary demands on your video hardware, choosing a good video
card and configuring it properly are key to ensuring a good gaming experience. For advanced
gaming, you need to go beyond what a basic 64-bit card can do for you.
Binary-Only Video Card Drivers
Most serious Linux gamers have either an NVIDIA or ATI card, so that??™s the short answer to starting
out with serious Linux gaming. Although open source drivers are available for most NVIDIA and
ATI cards, those drivers do not support 3D hardware acceleration. While that??™s fine for most desktop
applications, for gaming you want to get the binary-only drivers for those cards from the following
locations:
NVIDIA??”To get NVIDIA drivers that run in Linux, go to the Unix Drivers Portal Page
(www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html).
ATI??”To find Linux drivers for ATI video cards, visit the ATI support Knowledge Base
page, which describes Linux drivers, at http://support.ati.com/ and click on the
Knowledgebase tab.
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Running Applications Part IV
When you go to get a binary-only video driver, be sure that you know not only the video card
model you are using, but also the name and version of your X server. (XFree86 used to be the most
popular server, but many of the biggest Linux distributions now use X.
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