Help me pick a replacement graphics card?

[Kirk Strauser]

My aging GeForce MX 400 is dying and I want to replace it with something a bit 
more modern.  My desktop is running FreeBSD 6.2 on a Asus A7V (Via chipset) 
motherboard with a 1.4GHz Athlon.  This is more of a hardward question than 
software, although pointers to any FreeBSD-specific driver gotchas would be 
appreciated.

Basically, I want to run a few OpenGL apps (particular the "Second Life" 
client, which works perfectly under Linux emulation), so I pretty much have 
to use the "nvidia" driver and not the open "NV" driver.  The old card's 
performance was fine for my purposes, so almost much anything at all newer 
should be OK.  Therefore, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this.  
However, I don't want to buy a card so old that NVidia will drop support for 
it in the next driver upgrade, as they did with this current card.

My motherboard has an AGP 4x slot that the "nvidia" driver wants to run in 2x 
mode because it doesn't like the Via chipset.  Now, it seems like there are 
precious few AGP 4x cards available these days; most look like 8x.  Are those 
backward compatible all the way to 2x?  Google returns plenty of 
authoritative-sounding hits on both sides.

Is there anything else I should be looking for?  Any specific models you might 
recommend?
-- 
Kirk Strauser
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