for best quality 2D graphics and color on linux, ATI or nvidia?

[Hephasteus]

Are you saying that my PVA is "better" than H-IPS? Or that it is an inferior product to H-IPS and costs 2x as much to produce?

With regards to the LCD, the only thing I like about them is their perfect uniformity. No stuffing around with stretching and panning settings. Just always sharp. What I don't understand is that PVA apparently has the best contrast ratio, yet I can't seem to agree with that.

Yes. I-HPS robots and machines are on a much higher pay scale and have to use higher quality electricity. They can't function on the poor quality un line conditioned electricity you can use to manufacture PVA screens. Hence the double price.

[mithu]

The idea was that 2D rendering was handled by a high quality 2D video card ...
and accelerated 3D graphics at full 32 bit color, while the Voodoo's were stuck
at 16 bit color. ATI, together with nVidia, played king of hill. Their
products have been ... If you have your heart set to buy the best card for Linux

[b15hop]

The idea was that 2D rendering was handled by a high quality 2D video card ...
and accelerated 3D graphics at full 32 bit color, while the Voodoo's were stuck
at 16 bit color. ATI, together with nVidia, played king of hill. Their
products have been ... If you have your heart set to buy the best card for Linux

Those days are long gone though. I would say Matrox cards might still be of higher quality. Although both Nvidia and ATI are probably right up there with the best. Don't forget Matrox do 3D and 2D these days not just 2D.

[tuxdriver]

For best 2D quality with an analog connection, get an old ATI R200 or R300 AGP card. You won't believe the difference - it's like putting a high-quality Matrox card inside your PC

Besides the superb text and color reproduction, you get dedicated hardware for 2D acceleration / Xvideo and the best open source support with the Radeon (R200/R300) drivers.

Old cards have some kind of hardware anti-aliasing/smoothing. Newer ATI cards (the HD series) don't have this feature.
Just compare the text rendering at higher resolutions for example: With the HD cards the fonts are rough, thin and illegible.
What a shame - the 2D quality of modern ATI cards is now on par with that of nVidia (and I always avoided nVidia cards because of that)

With a R200 card, you'll get crystal clear text on a LCD without the need to use software (OS) antialiasing and really sharp line, text and graphics rendering at very high resolutions on a CRT.
I haven't found any modern card that can do this.

R200/R300 cards have VGA and DVI outputs and can drive monitors with resolutions up to 2048x1536 / 2560x1600,just like modern ATI hardware.