Nah, Ignore my DDRAW complaints. You'll see those very rarely and they can be fixed by simply disabling DirectDraw Acceleration.....for now. I'm wondering how well this will work with Vista. I'd like to compare the games that I was having issues with, with my Geforce cards but I doubt I'll bother....unless the problem increases.
As for OGL I'm sure you know all about ATI's problems there both in Windows and Linux. No sense going over those again.....
As far as D3D compatibility ATI and Nvidia seem about even there....although it's been some time since I tested the games on my list with an Nvidia card. I owned pretty much every Nvidia card since the TNT before the 9700 and had went through most of my games on Windows 2000 and most of Windows XP and compatibility was fine.....but all of that testing was done back before Sept 2002 when I picked up my 9700. I've just done testing with ATI since then. Occasionally I pop in my old Geforce cards and I haven't seen any complaints from users about D3D compatibility so yeah ATI/Nvidia are about the same there.
I'm not really up on the 2D quality between Nvidia/ATI. I did buy a Matrox G400 back in the day and compared to my TNT1 it had great 2D and excellent TV out. The Geforce cards after that weren't that hot compared to the G400 and when I picked up my 9700, I didn't worry that much about 2D/TV Out since my 9700 did everything just fine and the X800 seems to be just as good.
I really don't see how there can be that much difference nowadays as far as 2D/TV Out between Nvidia/ATI but I really haven't given it much though since I don't use TV out as much as I used to and I worry more about other things than an almost imperceptible increase/decrease in 2D quality.
As far as VESA goes....I wish there was a site that lists VESA compatibility/Speed. I do have a couple of Geforce cards laying around and if I wasn't so lazy I could probably load up whatvga and do some testing and post some results.....
Let's see I have:
Tseng ISA (dunno the model #)
Voodoo 3 AGP
Geforce 2
Geforce 3
Geforce 4
Geforce FX 5200
ATI 9700
ATI 9700 AIW
ATI X800
I think I gave my TNT1/G400 away to some friends when I got my 9700, (they needed them more than I did).
I wish Matrox would get off their asses and produce something for the gaming market. The G400 was an excellent card and they were very competive with the TNT generation when they came out. Sadly, I think that's the last we'll see of Matrox in the gaming sector.....especially since I don't see much multimonitor gaming happening with ATI/Nvidia's cards.
The only other company I can think of is S3......buy they haven't really produced anything worth mentioning since Windows 3.x days (S3 Trio!)