As one of the other posters said, buy an older R500 based ATI card. I'm trying this out myself; I ordered a card this week and (hopefully) will find out how well it works with the Radeon driver. But everything I've read suggests it will work pretty well.

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R520#Variants

I also ordered a (cheap) R600 (or R700? don't remember...) based card to experiment with or put on the shelf for a few months; people seem to be working quite hard on ironing the bugs out, and those will probably be well supported in the future.

I ordered my R580+ based card from a place called compuvest. It was my first order with them so I can't say whether or not they're worth recommending. They seem to have a lot of generation-ago equipment. Another place to try would be geeks.com, which is where I got the R600 based card.

I'm not sure how well this will work out, but that's what I'm trying...

Hope you don't mind... I've been keeping kind of a low profile on the 'dot lately, so I didn't really want to reply to your current post... so I thought I'd say hi in this old journal entry instead. I hope you'll see it!

Blender! I've been working with Blender on and off for almost a year now! I hope you'll come join us over at http://blenderartists.org/forum; they're a nice bunch of people and very helpful. Blender is somewhat painful to learn, in the early stages, but with a little help, once you get into the swing of things, it's actually surprisingly easy to use!

I also set up a website, http://blender.sakelley.org, which has some GPLed texture plugins, and not much else at the moment. I'm still (usually) to shy to post my own work anywhere... but I've done almost 200 stills, and I'm working on a short film.

If I can be of any help, please do let me know. Email's in my slashdot profile.

Good job on the sword, too! :-)

Oh, and congrats on the wedding (and on surviving it)! I haven't been posting, but I have been reading...

Sarah