Old And Slow

I started playing with with 3D modelling software (Blender, Wings 3D, and MakeHuman) and was graphically (pun intended) shown just how old and slow my ATI 9250 graphics card really is. The older GPU has are several problems which are individually tolerable, but, when taken together, you've basically hit a wall.

I'm shopping around for a replacement card. I have three basic constraints: I'm on a very tight budget, I want an ATI GPU, and it must be an AGP card. AGP?! Yup, I'm not replacing the motherboard yet (see constraint #1) so that's the way it has to be. An older design such as this ATI 3650 should be adequate.

Nvidia may offer better performance but that really only matters to serious gamers. Nvidia's closed source Linux drivers are actually very good, but since AMD released the programming documentation for ATI GPUs, the open source drivers for have been improving slowly but steadily. They are far from perfect yet but with proper documentation available, it's only a matter of time.