Radeon HD2600 for HD in Linux?

[RHQN]

I'm about to buy a new computer and I'm having trouble deciding on which graphics card to choose. I'm thinking one of these two:

Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS SilentPipe 256MB

Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB

Will either of these cards be able to decode HD movies in x264 under Linux and leave the cpu free to other stuff? With or without free drivers? Will the free ATI drivers eventually support this?

I had a Radeon 9800 Pro and when I selected an area on the desktop in Ubuntu (you know when you click somewhere and drag the pointer over the desktop to select several icons) it was very choppy, I read something about that being a problem with ATI drivers. If I get the Radeon HD2600 will it work smooth?

[Kano]

No cards supports h264 accelleration with Linux. The 7xxx series of Nvidia would support mpeg2 acc with xvmc, 8xxx only has got xv. All those h264 acc is Windows only.

[RHQN]

Thanks for the quick reply.

[Ole-Martin Broz]

Ive not seen ANY cards do compressed h.264 or what its called, well, the 2600 XT 256 mb gddr4 should be a nice card, my hdmi works with audio as far as im aware of in GUTSY !

Im using 2900 XT