Linux

Pretty much the only considerations are AMD or NVidia.

NVidia is known for just working (though there was some stuff with 9XX series cards support, but I believe it's resolved now).
The caveat is you are limited to proprietary drivers. Which means no GalliumNine (and gallium in general) and all the stuff. Ever. Just forget about it.

AMD is known for just not working, and it's motto is "opensource divers are almost ready, just need weeding some bugs and implementing some OGL extensions".

Lately, though, opernource drivers are pretty nice. Due to hardware issues I had to be left without my laptop and use my old desktop with HD4870, and it was working flawlessly including GaliiumNine.

The caveat is newer AMD cards support is much less consistent. HD4870 is r600g which just works. radeonsi was known to have bugs all over it, and amdgpu is too bleeding edge. Also you WILL need the newest kernel and mesa in existence.

If you want to go AMD way you have to make sure the particular chip you are aiming at isn't bugged to hell, and that is independent research.

PS: there are also general issues with AA and high shaders I believe.
Not sure about AA since I don't use it, but high shaders are buggy for me on NVidia.

There should be packaged latest kernel and mesa around. There are ubuntu PPAs foor example.

If I wanted a new desktop, I'd by AMD after some research, but I'm biased. Laptop selection is limited, and there you go with whatever is available though, but there I'd prefer AMD because opensource drivers can into DRI_PRIME. But I'm biased too. Technically bumblebee works and is probably much less hassle to make it work.

No, you'd just need to find a card that works now. But with the new amdgpu driver under active development it's unclear what would be better in the long run - that is, what's the fate of radeonsi and what amdgpu will support.

Idunno. Apparently EVE client multithreads rather well since a single eve process loads several cores for me.
As for the wine itself, I think it spawns one wineserver and some additional processes per prefix (not sure, but definitely NOT per process). But I would not worry about that.

Other things I'd look at would probably be wireless NICs if you are planning to use one, since wifi drivers are a clusterfuck. Even intel is crap, and I'm not sure what's a good choice. Oh, and fancy soundcards. I think, creative cards don't work historically.

If you want to use latest stuff (not wait for new kernel, xorg...) you want an AMD card between a Radeon 7970 and the r9 290. These are perfect for EVE (Currently have a 7970HD and it pump about 220FPS at interval immediate and stay at 60 with Interval one, everything to max and it just never crash and... that's more FPS than when I run EVE on Windows).

You off course will need git mesa, llvm, ddx ati, libdrm and el kernel 4.3 minimum.

You also want the nine-patched wine for native d3d9.

With that setup, you also pump less juice as you use less resources converting D3D9 to OpenGL.

If you want that setup, just don't buy a card requiring AMDGPU (the newest cards) as it's still too new and buggy. RadeonSI is just the best.



If you want the latest card or want to use the pooprietary drivers, go for nvidia, they have the opposite drivers status (Good proprietary drivers, utter crap open source drivers)

Gallium nine pretty much offers a native DirectX 9 interface. With a patch, wine can make use of that and thereby save a lot of performance where it otherwise would have to translate DX9 to OGL first. You need both mesa and wine compiled with the nine parameter enabled for this to work.

This is pretty much what it means to use an AMD card at the moment. You get excellent performance with open source drivers, but you pretty much need to use bleeding edge patched sources that may or may not explode in your face.

You will probably find it hard to come up with a setup that does not work unless you deliberately buy old or very cheap hardware.

I used to have an AMD Phenom 9850 (2.5GHz, quad-core with 8GB RAM) with an Nvidia GTX260 card (216 cores <1GB RAM). It ran EVE at 90-110 FPS under Linux. I have upgraded to an AMD FX 4300 recently, am still using my GTX260 with it, and get 120-130 FPS at 1920x1080. If I set everything to low or off do I get 200+ FPS...

So if I can get 100 FPS and more with 7-years old hardware then I really do not see how you can do much wrong when you buy recent hardware.

That said, Nvidia has provided decent drivers for Linux for many years now and those work out-of-the-box with many distributions. I cannot say much about AMD graphics cards and drivers other than having read their regular reviews at Phoronix.com. Nothing so far has swayed me to go back to ATI/AMD, to go "full AMD", but I remain with Nvidia graphics cards for now. I did go back and forth between ATI/AMD and Nvidia in the past, but I have honestly no reason to dump Nvidia. It has been a really good experience with them.

A GTX750 Ti or the more recent GTX950/GTX960 should do a good job at running EVE at 4K resolution. Here are two links to some interesting comparisons at Phoronix:

The NVIDIA/AMD Cards On Linux With The Best Value For 2015 Holiday Shopping

4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux

PS: Not too long ago did the somewhat older Nvidia driver for my aging GTX260 fail to compile with a recent kernel. Yet, Nvidia still updated the old driver to compile with newer kernel versions. This needs to be mentioned, too. The issue itself was rather small and I could fix it myself, but this shows that Nvidia not only cares for problems of their latest hardware, but does go back and keeps updating their older Linux drivers when needed. Nor are their drivers completely closed, but one can modify some of it.