I need to buy a good grafics card for a new computer wich will be used for 3D modeling and rendering only (no games and stuff). In my old computer I use an ATI Radeon. Since it took me a long time to make the ATI go along with blender satisfactorily I’d like to be smarter this time and ask the forum before I buy a card.
So, are there any dos and donts regarding cards? Some known bugs? What will be your dream card/chip for blender (if money was no object 
)?
Ulli
I just bought a Geforce 4 5700FX TD as ATI don’t care much for open-source. My previous Geforce 4 MX440 was for blender purpose just as great.
i also had bad experiances with ATI Radeon cards, the performance was horrible!
i only have a very cheap nvidia Ti-4500 now and it’s working great with blender, no problems.
(only if i run other 3d programms at the same time the performance gets bad)
Nothing new:
Do: Buy nVidia
Don’t: Buy ATI.
I run Blender on FX 5700 and Geforce 2 go, even the latter one is fine for me. The FX 5700 takes even my biggest scenes (forest) easily, and they are considerably cheap now.
i got a Geforce FX 5700 LE Optima 128 MB DDR, 500MHz Memory Data Rate. it runs live rendering demos designed for the Geforce FX 5900 Ultra. of course i also have Nforce 2 chipset on my mother board
nVidia is the way to go, especially if you’re using linux. Their installer is the greatest 8)
the best one you can buy? Nvidia 6800ultra
sure it costs 400+ dollars but you can run doom 3 on ultra without any slowdowns…
but if your going for economy and performance the previous king 5950 are going for good prices…
i run a 5600 and its not that bad, but of course i have a rather old k7 2500+ amd…need to get me that fx-55 from them and a 6800ultra, nothing in blender would slow my arse down
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34444
Used to own ATI as well.
Just sell it for an nVidia.
You’ll have no regrets. Blender was made for nVidia. 
Emphasize: … HAD … WAS …
The performance problems with ATI cards are solved. I have a Radeon 9700 at home and a Radeon 9200 SE at work. Blender 2.36 runs perfectly on both with the current Catalyst 4.12 driver.
So, you can depend your decision on other things but Blender compatibility, like cost-performance-ratio, performance in games, support for linux, whatever you are interested in beside Blender.
I my opinion the difference between ATI and nVdia and GUI in 3d programs, are NONE or maybe very, very little, simple you just don’t see them.
And when it come to rederind… no 3d card is used. All render math stuff is done only by CPU. So buy better, faster CPU than graphic card.
Quoted from here:https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34444
1. When I click file and move my mouse quickly it selects something even though I didn’t click the mouse. Really annoying.
Occasionally zooming in and out in 3d view is really slow.
Selected vertices, flash purple and yellow.
It all depends on your computer. You can’t say, “the difference between ATI and nVdia and GUI in 3d programs, are NONE or maybe very, very little, simple”.
The problems I had with blender made it unusable. Id never had problems before. It just depends.
But in general. ATI users have way more problems then nVidia users.