After working as a linux-audio sysadmin for 4 years, heres my experience with gfx-cards (my memory might be a bit unaccurate though): Matrox 400+500: Had four of those. All the machines were somewhat unstable for unknown reasons, also in windows. I'll probably never trust matrox again. I think the sharpness of those cards are overhyped, at least with long cables, its not as good as the gforce cards I have tried. Ati: Tried two the newer types 8xxx/9xxx. One of them have a picture that sometimes is a bit psychedelic, the other one caused crashes and had to be replaced (with a gforce card). Built-in intel graphics driver: Two of those, very old type. No problem, exept that it couldn't handle 1600x1200 resolution with at least 16bit colors. Very sharp pictures. Nvidia rio (or something): Had two of those. No problem with the open source drivers, but the pictures were quite blury. Nforce built-in gfx-card: Tried something like 4-5 of those. All works, but they need the binary-driver, and the picture is not sharp. Bad stuff. Nvidia gforce 2,3 and 4: Had something like 8 of them. All worked flawlessly with extremely sharp pictures. No problem with latency, because they work just fine with the open-source drivers. My next gfx card will probably be a gforce 4, if its still possible to buy it. Nvidia gforce fx: Tried one of those. In the beginning, the open source driver were horrible slow, so I had to use the binary driver. But that was fixed later, and now it works just fine with the open source driver. Very sharp picture, just like the other gforce cards.