EVGA GeForce GT 520 Pro Reviews

While the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 may be a "Fermi" graphics card, its performance is not very stellar. The OpenGL performance of this low-end graphics card under Linux was easily outdone by the Radeon HD 4650, which is two generations old on the AMD side and now just costs around $40+ compared to the GT 520 at $60 or more. Beyond the obvious OpenGL advantage, the Radeon HD 4650 is well-supported now by AMD's open-source Linux driver stack with KMS and Gallium3D support, where as all open-source NVIDIA support is provided just by the open-source community when reverse-engineering the NVIDIA blob. About the only major advantage the GT 520 would still carry is its support for VDPAU using the PureVideo HD engine when using the proprietary driver. AMD's X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) API and implementation still is not as good as VDPAU found with NVIDIA's driver and their hardware, if you are interested in a media/HTPC-type system.