ATI Linux drivers suck eggs compared to Nvidia's. The flgrx driver is a complete turd to install even on the distros that ATI say they support. I have tried installing the flgrx rpms on Mandrake, Fedora Core and SuSe to no avail. Nvidia's rpm's however install without any problems and in some cases the distros are Nvidia hardware accelerated out of the box.

In terms of performance Nvidia hold the edge due to their excellent OpenGL experience. I pray that the rumours are true and that ATI are indeed pushing resources at creating a nice linux following. I don't think I can stand my standard VESA compliant acceleration much longer. If I could get Catalyst 4.91 peformance in linux, I will never ever buy another version of winblows again.