What ATI video card do you use for a simple gentoo funbox or

[cwc]

I am currently looking into getting an ATI for my Gentoo box(GNOME) and some other Debian machines (XFCE)
I have a Zotac: NVIDIA Corporation GF119 [GeForce GT 610] (rev a1)

I don't keep up with the Politics of video drivers but I know Linux Torvard had a huge rant about NVIDIA

I need hdmi and vga .
I do not play games .
I used Blender to model for 3d printing.

Please throw me a bone on what is working for you.

or should I just stick with Nvidia.
_________________
Without diversity there can be no evolution:)

[Ant P.]

ATi hasn't existed for over a decade so you should probably keep that nvidia card...

[cwc]

LOL. woops
Ok No ATI.

AMD

https://www.amazon.com/Asus-PCI-Express-EAH6450-SILENT-1GD3/dp/B004X8EO6Q/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1515877934&sr=1-3&refinements=p_36%3A1253504011%2Cp_n_feature_keywords_five_browse-bin%3A8259091011

How about the above card?
_________________
Without diversity there can be no evolution:)

[Ant P.]

I had that exact card for several years until I upgraded a month ago. It's worked with no problems since day 1, doesn't produce much heat (maximum is about 65°C) but is showing its age slightly. H264 decode works fine up to 1080p and the OpenGL performance is tolerable, officially it only supports up to GL3.3.

[tinea_pedis]

Fiji (R9 Nano and Fury) and Tonga (R9 380) and any older AMD/Ati microarch GPU will work great with the in-kernel radeon/amdgpu drivers and mesa opengl libraries.

Except that the performance, especially 3D performance is very dependant on CPU single threaded performance with the open driver stack; anything less than Intel Sandy Bridge (AMD Piledriver for example) and the performance is less than ideal. And the applications need to be compiled against recent libraries; older proprietary software will have fairly bad performance with the open drivers (for example, many of the games ported and released by Loki; and all Unreal engine games ported by Icculus, UT, UT2003, UT2004 and Armyops).
The proprietary AMD and especially Nvidia drivers are much less depedant on the CPU performance.

I've used HD6850 (Barts) for seven years now with the open driver stack, CPU being 2500k and it's been great and stable. When the amdgpu in-kernel driver received powerplay patches, the R9 Nano (Fiji) and R9 380 (Tonga) have been stable, but I've not really used them much to say for certain, but as a minimum, the R9 380 had a 3D performance equal to the HD6850 (which it of course should - with the closed drivers; not the case with open drivers immediately) when kernel 4.4 was released (can't remember what was the latest mesa, llvm and xorg server versions at the time) and VDPAU decoding h264 stream worked without a hitch with mplayer2.

As long as the Nvidia blob supports the kernel and x server versions you use, 99% time the driver works flawlessly and has great 3D performance and VDPAU decoding works perfectly. Except for vertical sync, that seems to broke very often. One day Nvidia will stop supporting the card and you're on your own and as a closed drivers, it's a black box.
The open nouveau drivers sadly have nowhere near the performance of the equilevant radeon/amdgpu drivers - thanks to Nvidia not giving the programmers any support whatsoever, not even for the older cards; for example, FX5600 with nouveau still has only 10% 3D opengl performance of the last nvidia blob branch that supported the card.