The guys who laid out the future of real-time graphics a while back have now dissected ATI's Radeon 9700 chip. Their analysis breaks down performance into multiple components--fill rate, occlusion detection, pixel shaders, vertex shaders, antialiasing--and tests each one synthetically before moving on to the usual application tests like SPECviewperf and UT 2003. You can see exactly how this chip advances the state of the art in graphics, piece by piece. Interesting stuff.

I wonder if they set on fire if you take the heatsink off like Atlons use to or still do. That was a funny movie, but really I'm perfectly happy still getting a GeForce4, Nvidia has better drivers, then ATI especially under linux, so if I want to play UT2003 under linux I'd better stick with Nvidia.

Nvidia does have better Linux drivers, but ATI's Windows drivers are pretty much even. I know you don't care about that, but oh well.

I do care, cause I have a windows game machine(well atleast until there is a better solution on the linux end). Linux is my main consern though.

There are drivers for the Radeon, though im not sure wether for the newest series - if you got bad luck all is for radeon 7500 ..
Have a look at dri.sourceforge.net if you are interested.
If they support the newest cards, they still have many deficits concerning the newer features, like environmental bump mapping or pixel shaders which are not yet supported at all.

As opposed the nVidia drivers for Linux are in fact compared to Linux standards pretty unstable. Though if you're used windows stability this is not an issue

Concerning UT2K3: Yes, it runs on Linux.
BUT not really nicely. As the devs of UT said: "We have ported a few basic functions from Direct3d to OpenGL .. but we'd have to spend much time to make OpenGL as fast as Direct3d".
This means, UT has been actually optimized for the Direct3d graphics library. OpenGL works, but it's sloooooow .. on my GeForce4 Ti4600 I only had about 20 fps MAX even when I turned the details down.
Using Windows it worked flawlessly with a higher resolution at constant 35 fps with bots (flying round without bots i think somewhat with 80)
If they had optimized it for OpenGL it would be slow on Direct3d .. but I think it's a nice step into the right direction to offer a Linux variant.

There are drivers for the Radeon, though im not sure wether for the newest series - if you got bad luck all is for radeon 7500 ..
Have a look at dri.sourceforge.net if you are interested.
If they support the newest cards, they still have many deficits concerning the newer features, like environmental bump mapping or pixel shaders which are not yet supported at all.

As opposed the nVidia drivers for Linux are in fact compared to Linux standards pretty unstable. Though if you're used windows stability this is not an issue

Concerning UT2K3: Yes, it runs on Linux.
BUT not really nicely. As the devs of UT said: "We have ported a few basic functions from Direct3d to OpenGL .. but we'd have to spend much time to make OpenGL as fast as Direct3d".
This means, UT has been actually optimized for the Direct3d graphics library. OpenGL works, but it's sloooooow .. on my GeForce4 Ti4600 I only had about 20 fps MAX even when I turned the details down.
Using Windows it worked flawlessly with a higher resolution at constant 35 fps with bots (flying round without bots i think somewhat with 80)
If they had optimized it for OpenGL it would be slow on Direct3d .. but I think it's a nice step into the right direction to offer a Linux variant.

Sorry, my old - well known multipost problem

I don't care about this cause my comps are too old, they don't have any agp slots so I couldn't get one even if I had the money

I never said I needed to play UT2003, I never got into the whole UT. NWN is going to be cool on linux. Just remeber if its opengl and its an nvidia card, and it doesn't run on linux there is no way in #### it will run in windows.

Why don't you just go marry Linus Thorvald.